“I’m shocked. I’m agog, and I don’t even know what agog means.”
When Joni Rutledge said on Monday that her previous night had been “wonderful” she was perhaps using that adjective a little differently than you or I.
Until last Thursday, you see, her bed was the driver’s seat of her 2010 Pontiac G5 sedan.
Then the provincial Department of Community Services read in these pages about how, after having three toes amputated due to complications from diabetes, Rutledge lost her job and then her apartment, and, at age 63, ended up homeless in a Dartmouth Walmart parking lot.
Since the government got involved she’s been staying at the Dartmouth Travelodge on the province’s dime.
“The bed,” she said in a swooning, luxuriant tone when I ask about the accommodations, “oh my God you just sprawl right out on it.”
And the bathroom: “You don’t have to drive a kilometre to use the bathroom.”
Come Thursday when her Community Services-paid reservation at the motel is slated to end, Rutledge could technically be back living in her car.
But that seems unlikely given the outpouring of generosity towards this woman who has spent so much of her life looking after others — her mom, a beloved niece with special needs, a brother laid low by cancer.
“I’m more than surprised,” Rutledge said, “I’m shocked. I’m agog, and I don’t even know what agog means.”
They started arriving last Thursday not long after her story appeared in The Chronicle Herald and on our website. (Don’t tell me that local journalism doesn’t matter.)
The people with cheques for her, and even cash right out of their pocket, like the single mom who said that she didn’t have much but knew what Rutledge was going through, before handing her a $5 bill.
The people with blankets and clothes.
The people she hadn’t seen in half a century, like the financial services big-wig she went to junior high school with who showed up to give her some dough and promised more to come, and the woman Rutledge once worked with over in Shearwater who pushed some gas money on her former workmate.
“A big part of me feels that I don’t deserve this.”
Some of the gestures are so touching I’m welling up just writing about them. The man who showed up with the still-warm chicken soup his wife had just made. The guy who handed her his card, just in case she needed work done on her car. The older gentleman who arrived with the scarf and hat his wife had knitted.
“It’s overwhelming,” said Rutledge who estimates that she has received some 200 texts, emails, Facebook messages and telephone calls from people wanting to help since her story became public. “A big part of me feels that I don’t deserve this.”
I got some of them too: from a woman named Kayla offering her “some meals, a warm and clean place to shower, someone to talk to,” and the owner of a Dartmouth feed store who remembered how Rutledge, not a dog owner herself, used to buy treats for her co-worker’s pets from him.
From volunteers at places like Hope Kitchen and Dartmouth Family Centre and Community Food Centre, who wanted to help, and folks bemoaning the social assistance programs in Nova Scotia, which have left a woman like Rutledge in such dire straits.
Through me total strangers offered her accommodations in the Annapolis Valley and New Brunswick, a former co-worker said Rutledge could stay with her for a few nights and someone who knew her from when she lived in Glace Bay simply reached out, aghast at the situation her old friend finds herself in.
Something about her story — this selfless woman who had somehow fallen through the cracks, beneath our very eyes — seemed to touch so many.
Evan Hennigar had never met Rutledge. But the NSCC student was heading home to Mahone Bay for Christmas. After reading about her, he offered Rutledge his vacant Dartmouth apartment.
“It’s not so much kind as it is not being completely selfish,” the 18-year-old told me by email.
Evan Lafford, on the other hand, had worked with Rutledge for four years at the Dartmouth call centre that last summer laid her off for absenteeism.
“She was always kind, and generous,” Lafford said via email. “She wouldn’t hesitate to help anyone out, and her humour really brightened up the day.”
So when Lafford, 29, read of her plight he set up a GoFundMe campaign in the hope of keeping Rutledge off the streets for the winter, or at least until some permanent senior’s housing is found for her.
His hope was to raise $500 or $600 (“Every little bit helps.”) But less than 24 hours after its launch the campaign already topped $2,000.
As I typed these words the total had reached $4,200, with the contributions ranging from $500 from one anonymous donor, to many $10 and $5 pledges.
The money, Lafford says, will be used to find her an accessible place to live — along with being diabetic, Rutledge is severely arthritic with very limited mobility — until some senior’s housing opens up for her.
To date, Community Services has found her two seniors housing options, but they’re far from her friends and medical specialists.
So, Rutledge waits and hopes. But she no longer feels alone.
Somehow people just find out where she is and show up at her motel.
On Friday a carload of Cape Bretoners is slated to arrive with a trunk-full of stuff collected for her.
“I think they’re from the Sydney area,” she said, meaning that these strangers live a four-hour drive on winter roads away.
But, hey, it's Christmastime. A woman who has helped so many needs a hand. A life that just days ago seemed so bleak, looks a shade brighter.
RELATED: JOHN DeMONT: After ‘three bad blows,’ 63-year-old woman ends up living in car
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