“One afternoon I got a call from the police. Richard had gone into someone’s yard and taken a few apples. The people who lived there were not happy. To them he was just some dirty intruder.” Mitchell shakes his head. “Poor Richard”

“What happened?” Olive and I chorus. We’re horrified.

“If you were the police, what would you do? The officers led Richard out of the yard, but there was no way they were going to arrest him. They could have charged him with trespass and theft. The homeowners wanted them to.

The police asked me to talk them [sic]. I sat at their kitchen table, and I told them Richard was harmless. I told them he had gotten confused. I said he would never trespass again. That’s what they wanted to hear.

“It was weeks before Richard stopped trembling. I did my best to comfort him, but he didn’t sleep well for many nights.”

Mitchell reached for the teapot and topped up our cups. “The saddest thing was that Richard didn’t even pick those apples,” he said. “He just gathered windfall.”

“Windfall?” I asked.

“Apples that fall to the ground because of wind or the simple pull of gravity.”

Mitchell looked at us sadly. “When I was a boy, my mom would ask me, ‘If a hungry man steals a loaf of bread, is it really stealing?’ I believe food can’t be stolen. Hunger is different from greed.”