Around this time of year when the weather gets cooler in Arkansas, there are a lot of homeless people, as well as people with different situations who just need help.
Oftentimes our family serves at a soup kitchen where they give out bags of food to needy families in our area. And we'll help put those bags of food together and hand them out, among other things.
There are a lot of reasons why serving the community is important to me, but one of them has to do with my father. My grandfather died when my father was 4 years old and my grandmother had four kids all under the age of 5, all born pretty close together. That was a time when things were so bad in the country. There wasn't work and often the family hardly made ends meet, so my grandmother put the kids in a children's home so that they could at least have food to survive.
My dad said he never forgot the local charity would bring the kids a gift for Christmas. The kids worked hard in the children's home and the only present they got was from the local charity. He never forgot this kindness and always appreciated the local charity for what it did when he was a little boy.
My dad was such a hardworking worker family meant the world to him. I was the seventh baby in my family and my mother had me just after she turned 40. She was one of those high risk pregnancy moms, and I'm so grateful she had me. My mom and dad made a happy home for us, and I'm so grateful for that. I hope my children are catching those lessons, not just from Mom and Dad, but from grandparents and everyone else in their lives.
