"Lawrence is 74 years old. She and Jacob, who is now 80, have run a renegade back-yard social program ...
Every day Lawrence and her husband load up with cardboard boxes and drive to grocery stores to pick up donated food. They feed children after school and give food boxes and clothes to people who arrive at their door every day around 4:15 p.m.
The mortgage wasn't the first problem on her mind, she said as we drove over to Carrs Aurora Village.
"We need a truck," she said. A big one, tall enough to back up to the truck bay at grocery stores, so Jacob doesn't have to lift the heavy boxes so far....
Inside the back door at Carrs, the Lawrences unloaded grocery carts full of day-old baguettes, dented cans of pumpkin, nearly out-of-date cottage cheese and lackluster cucumbers. Lawrence peered through a plastic dome that held a day-old coconut cake decorated with plastic Santa Clauses.
"Look how blessed we are!" she said.
Jacob stooped over a box. He was wearing a hearing aid made to look like a Bluetooth headset they bought from a television commercial, but he still couldn't hear too much. He pulled boxes across the floor, seeming tired.
When all the boxes were full, Jacob pushed them into the van, filling it from floor to ceiling. I perched on a sliver of back seat, a box of bread in my lap. By the time we got through Midtown, Lawrence was deep in old stories. One time she gave away their bed while Jacob was out of town. Ooh, he was gonna be mad. But someone donated another one just in time...
At 4:15 p.m on Monday, 30 people stood in the driveway on Richmond Avenue, shivering in house shoes and sweatshirts, carrying blanket-wrapped children, hobbling on limbs chewed up by diabetes, pushing walkers and rolling shopping bags over the snow.
Inside, Lawrence and a couple volunteers parceled out cakes and handfuls of mushrooms and Yoplait yogurts and garlic bread. Cardboard boxes filled with chaotic stacks covered every surface. Someone knocked on the door. Lawrence sighed and cracked it open.
"I know your feet cold. You know this is Alaska, right?" she hollered. "We're doing the hard work in here. You're the one that need to bundle up. Instead of complaining, thank God, OK? You know I love you."
I watched people trail in. There was a 20-something girl with a pierced lip, a harried single mother and her daughter, a 10-year-old girl, the oldest of eight, with her mother who spoke only Hmong, a middle-aged man who kept saying "I have nothing" in Spanish, and a delicate, wrinkled German woman whom Lawrence hugged for a long time. She sized up each person who came in, tucking in extra chocolate milk, or bread or cake, depending.
A grandmother from Laos came through the door, wearing only a sweater. Lawrence asked her where her coat was. She spoke no English. She looked at Lawrence blankly.
"You stay right there," Lawrence said, and disappeared upstairs. A few minutes later, she came back with a fur coat from her bedroom closet and wrapped it around the woman's shoulders. The woman smiled, showing a few missing teeth. She turned to a nephew and fluffed her hair like a movie star.
"You ain't givin' the best you got, you ain't giving nothing," Lawrence told me as the woman left, her box heavy with extra custard pie. "God will always take care of you."
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