I almost didn't go there.

We were walking the town again, in our yearly November ritual, scouting for food. The wife driving, and I and one of the older youths from our group walking both sides of the streets, knocking on doors too early on a Saturday morning for many folks, asking if they had any canned goods to donate. Partnered with the lad from our group was another youngster, his first year of this volunteer service. We had rescued him from his mother, and the horrid fate of being seen walking the streets with Brownies, and he was having a great time. Running from house to house, racing the older boy.

We had started next to the railroad tracks, the street where half the homes are abandoned and boarded up. The others all in some stage of renovation, with their 1870s stone foundations. Next came the main drag of town, mostly businesses, but with a few occupied houses mixed in. And now we were working east on Buffalo Street, still among buildings from the last decades of the 19th century.

Almost all the homes are on the east-west streets, with only a few facing the cross streets. While some teams drive their neighborhoods in a criss-cross pattern, nearly doubling their driving time, we have the walkers, or "knockers", as we call them, swing part way up the side streets before coming back down where the SUV is escorting us.

The wife and boys were already ahead of me, them racing and leap-frogging houses on their side of the street, when I came in sight of the lone little yellow house down the slope on the side street. Two empty lots on either side, above the tavern on the corner.

Hardly worth the effort to go down there. I suspect a lot of the folks living in such places are going to be on the receiving end of the charity food drive, not the giving end. But the tiny house is well maintained, the paint a bright schoolbus yellow. I cannot remember who lives there, but some memory suggests it has been worth the short walk in past years. So, the wife and boys moving even farther away, I turn right.

As I open the small gate in the patch of front yard, a small, old hispanic woman comes out the door. I don't know who she is, but I'm sure I've seen her before. She is wearing bright kitchen gloves, and bearing a plastic wash bucket, which she wearily dumps out over the side of the one-person porch.

Good morning, I greet her. We're scouting for food, do you have anything you would like to contribute?

"I'm sorry," she says, "we don't live here," nodding towards the other woman in bright gloves in the kitchen in the back of the house, no more than a dozen meters away.

"We're just cleaning."

The way she spoke made me think she had more to say, and I stayed silent by the door.

"My brother just died. We're cleaning his house."

The woman seems so small and frail as she stoops down to lean on the railing, and her shoulders shudder. She has been so stoic with this heart-breaking chore, and now she is about to lose her composure. I want to reach out and wrap my arms around her, and suspect she would not object. But instead, I lay my hand on her gloved hand still holding the screen door handle.

I'm so sorry.

"I wasn't going to tell you, " she says, "but..."

The other woman, younger, perhaps a daughter, is at her side now. "If ____ were alive, he would fill your bag," she said. "He was a generous man."

I do not remember the man, but I remember the house. No doubt she is speaking the truth. Again I tell her I am sorry for her loss, and leave as the younger woman turns the grieving sister back into the house. Back into the memories that are causing such pain.

It is a long walk, that half block back up the hill.

The boys have back-tracked and covered all the houses on my side of Buffalo, and are racing back to the SUV parked at the end of the street. I have nothing to do but walk the longest block of the morning. Thinking about two women, wiping away the remains of a loved brother's life. The boys and wife are all laughing as I finally climb into the car. The wife looks at me a little funny as I fail to join in.

It is unseasonably warm out. A rare calm, cloudless day.

I have no bitter wind to blame for the moisture in my eyes.