Poverty in real time

I never thought I would witness something like this, but a few weeks ago, I was in the home of a woman who was chopping up a coffee table to feed the wood stove. She and her three children had recently moved from one upstate NY county to another and were awaiting assistance for heating oil. In the meantime the temperature had dropped and the mobile home they lived in was cold and getting colder. There in the corner was a back-up woodstove, but there was no wood supply or money to have any delivered. So she resorted to using a hammer to chop up a small table, and used the kids' old homework papers to get the fire started. What she would feed the stove for the next 4 days until fuel was delivered I never found out. I did return later to bring a smoke detector. I hope she doesn't need it.