Just before midnight, I sat with Avery outside of a local Roy Rogers, talking about possible solutions to a serious problem. The owner of the property where he has stayed for nearly seven years has decided he has to leave, permanently, and take his dogs - 23 of them - with him. If he is not off of the land by tomorrow morning, he was told he would be arrested and the dogs taken away. He made a series of phone calls using a cell phone he purchased for this emergency until the battery on it died, and then he continued on using mine. There are two possibilities. But it was beyond the 11th hour and he could be arrested at any time.
In spite of it all, except for a moment of frustration and anguish left on my answering machine in which he vented - loudly at times - he has remained calm, hopeful, and believing that a solution would ultimately be found and that it would be positive.
Of interest, is the food. For the past seven years he has lived, he told me, on food from the dumpster there at that store and a dumpster in another place as well. For the first time, he went in - tonight - and purchased a hot meal. It was a small way, he told me, to say thank you for seven years of free food. And, he noted, hot potatoes taste very different than cold.