The story of "stone soup" exists all over the world. In my favorite variation, a hungry traveler appears in a village with nothing but an empty cooking pot, a spoon, and his appetite. When the suspicious villagers will not show him any hospitality, he sets up his cooking pot in the village square and begins to boil water with a simple stone in it. As the curious townsfolk pass by and ask him what he is doing, he stirs the pot and tells them that he is making stone soup. Further, he explains that at the end of the day when the soup is ready, everyone will be welcome to come and share it with him. Eventually, one person ventures that the soup might taste better with a few onions. Soon the villagers are each bringing a couple of carrots, a potato, a little salt, whatever they have on hand to add to the stone soup. At the end of the day, the whole town shares a delicious pot of soup (minus the stone, of course), and they have also learned a valuable lesson about the joys of shari...
A very good morning to all of you! We had an amazing weekend, and I sincerely hope you all did too. To jump right into it, we received three full pickup trucks' worth of food yesterday as a result of the one day Fill-a-Cruiser event! The Ayer Police Department , the Shirley Police Departmen t, and the Ayer/Shirley/Groton Rotary Club joined together, in cooperation with Ayer Shop n' Save , to hold the event in the broiling sun and high humidity. For three hours they stood out there and cheered on our donors. One truckload for each hour! I hope they felt it was worth it, because I can tell you for sure that the food collected will help to refill depleted shelves from which we pack our weekly pantry bags. Once the trucks arrived at the pantry, it took a little less than one hour to unload, sort, and pack everything into boxes, ready to start being shelved on Wednesday. What a great day! Thank you so very very much to all of the volunteers on both ends of the oper...