CHM Blog

When you deliver Meals on Wheels, it’s a process of give and take. You give the meal with a roll and dessert and, if it’s Monday, fruit. You take . . . well, that depends: typically a smile and “thank you”; sometimes a note on the door saying “please put in cooler.”

But if you walk into a certain house on Sunset Drive in Carrboro, you’ll be given a firm handshake and a “God bless you” and, if you have some time to spare, a vivid impromptu memoir of the Chapel Hill/Carrboro community over the past 80 years.

That’s how long this remarkable woman has lived here, growing up in the house next door, then raising her family in this two-bedroom house.

She’s been receiving Meals on Wheels ever since she became ill after her husband died. There’s a walker beside the table, but otherwise you wouldn’t know she’d been sick a day in her life. Her hair is raven-black, her bright eyes look keenly at you over the horn-rimmed glasses perched on the tip of her nose, and her sentences flow like a spring stream.

“After y’all put the food on this table, I sit down to eat right then. The meat is hot in its little compartment, and the salad is cold. And what I don’t eat I save for dinner because nowadays I’m afraid of using the gas stove," she says.

She recalls everything without a pause: the names of doctors, neighbors, ministers and each of her six grandchildren; the smell of fried chicken on childhood afternoons as she arrived at “The Old Camp Grounds” out on Highway 54; the way her husband handled paying utility bills because in those days “gentlemens were gentlemens” and women took care of house and children (and also, in her case, patients at Memorial Hospital).

These days she’s the one who receives the care: hot meat, cold salad and an extra sandwich on Friday to carry her through the weekend. But when you stand up to leave and feel her surprisingly strong handshake and hear “God bless you,” you take away a renewed sense of belonging to a beloved community.

More information:

If you know someone who would benefit from Meals on Wheels, or you wish to donate or volunteer, please contact the office at 942-2948 or visit the nonprofit's website. Established in 1976, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Meals on Wheels has delivered continuously since its inception, currently offering 93 meals daily to a population that is mixed in demographics: 61% are Caucasian, 39% are African-American, 65% are female, 35% are male.

Of those, 42% are receiving meals because they have serious health issues, 30% are disabled and 28% are considered elderly.