Earlywood: Answer the Door

Publisher’s note: It’s Saturday morning, and you know what that means – it’s time for Earlywood. Every Saturday, we publish a free excerpt from one of the thousands of pieces I’ve written since 1996. Sometimes it’s from a magazine article. Or a book. Or (in this case) a blog entry. This one is from May 2020. Each entry has been updated or annotated with some modern context or point of view. We hope you enjoy it.

Here in downtown Covington, we live with a lot of people who are in and out of homeless shelters. Plus, when my wife was a reporter at WCPO-TV here in Cincinnati, it was her job to write about homelessness, poverty and social justice issues. So it’s a topic at every dinner upstairs and at our storefront’s door every day downstairs.

When we lived in the wealthier suburb of Fort Mitchell, I never answered the front door (our doorbell broke about 1998, and I never fixed – bliss achieved). It was always someone trying to sell me wrapping paper or mulch. Or it was a political candida…