She lives in a car

BY TRISH STACHELSKI

The table is set for lunch. I sit down to share food and time with my family. Parked on the street just a few blocks away a woman makes her home in a van with covered windows. She moves the van every 48 hours to comply with the Minneapolis city ordinance for parked vehicles on residential streets. When she starts the engine, it sounds like a jet plane getting ready to take off. Some neighbors want to bring her food, others report her as suspicious. Police investigate and find her not home.

The tales of the nomadic seem to be something of history books. Prior to the 19th century conflicts with the U.S. Army, the Apache followed the migration of buffalo and pronghorn antelope. In 1960’s Ireland, the traveling people refused the government’s offer of residence. Rather than give up their mobile homes, they parked them on the streets.
How does a person set a table and make a home in the midst of great change and economic upheaval? The City of Davenport’s parking manager maintains a vegetable garden in an underused parking lot. It gives people who live downtown and don’t have a car to drive to a suburban grocery store a chance to eat fresh healthy food.

In Los Angeles, a city employee maintains tomato plants and herbs outside the doorway to City Hall. In Minneapolis, there is talk of converting more empty lots into urban gardens for growing whole foods, an alternative to fast food restaurants, which outnumber grocery stores in low-income neighborhoods. Now that spring has arrived, a neighbor on my block has resumed cultivating lettuce, beans and cucumbers,
free for the taking in a small sculptured garden on the public median.

The woman in the van seems to have disappeared. I don’t know if she drove away or was towed away. I’d like to think of her as a woman in charge of her own destiny with plans to move to a warmer state, meet up with friends or relatives who will invite her into their lives and refresh her with a good meal and the creature comforts of home.