Reporting Aside: Rather than investing in ‘stuff,’ Waterville woman says, invest in others

Brenda Whitney bags fresh produce while helping other volunteers as food is given away during the Winslow Community Cupboard’s visit to Skowhegan in January. Whitney, a Waterville resident, devotes her time to helping others. “I take people shopping, I take people to get groceries, get their medicine, go to the doctor, whatever they need,” she said. “My brother says it keeps me out of the bars.” Rich Abrahamson/Morning Sentinel file

Brenda Whitney pulled her maroon SUV up to the curb, parked, got out and retrieved a plastic dish from the back.

“Quacka, quacka!” she called out.

About 40 ducks came flocking in, landed on the snow and waddled over to her as she tossed cracked corn their way.

“Usually I’ll have, like, 70, and I get pigeons, too,” she said. “Every day that we don’t have a big storm, I’m here between 8 and 8:30, but this morning I was shoveling out.”

It was late Wednesday morning, the day after the nor’easter hit the region, and Whitney was greeting birds on the Kennebec riverfront near the Two Cent Bridge. She said she didn’t have a lot of time, as she had to be in Skowhegan at noon to help hand out free food from the Winslow Community Cupboard food truck.

She filled another dish with corn and tossed it to the birds.

Brenda Whitney feeds cracked corn to ducks Wednesday near Head of Falls in Waterville. Whitney spends much of her time helping others. “People invest too much of themselves into things — stuff — instead of other people. I’m a Christian, and I believe what Jesus said: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If you give kindness to others then you will receive kindness.” Amy Calder/Morning Sentinel

“They know me,” said Whitney, who is in her 70s. “They let me pet them sometimes. I’ve been doing this four or five years. The males are the ones with green heads, the females are the brown ones.”

All creatures have their own personalities, she said.

“God made us all that way. The only difference between us and the rest of the creatures is, God gave us the power of choice, and we’re responsible for the choices that we make and the consequences thereof.”

Whitney moved quickly as if on a mission. She introduced me to her dog, Honey, an old, brown chihuahua-dachshund mix that was curled up in a dog bed in the passenger seat of her SUV.

“She’s a rescue and she only looks like a dog,” she said. “She’s actually my daughter in a dog suit. She goes everywhere with me. She has a pet visitation pass and we visit hospitals and nursing homes.”

I met Whitney several years ago when she regularly brought food and other necessities to Vaughn Orchard, a man who lived in a tent in the trees on the riverbank. He died five years ago at 57. Whitney has been helping people all her life, though she doesn’t boast about it. I asked her what other volunteer work she does and she responded with self-deprecating humor.

“I take people shopping, I take people to get groceries, get their medicine, go to the doctor, whatever they need,” she said. “My brother says it keeps me out of the bars.”

Whitney lives in Waterville but grew up in Oakland. She wanted to be a forensic archaeologist when she was a teenager, but after a year of college she decided to go to nursing school. She worked as a registered nurse for 40 years.

“I loved nursing and then I worked as a traveling nurse,” she said. “I went all around the country.”

Whitney has long gray hair, strands of which poked out from under her black-and-white knitted cap as a cold wind blew across the riverfront. She is articulate in her speech and doesn’t shy away from saying what she thinks, especially about the way the world is going. It would be better off if people weren’t so self-focused, she said.

“People invest too much of themselves into things — stuff — instead of other people. I’m a Christian, and I believe what Jesus said: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If you give kindness to others then you will receive kindness. If you do something mean, then that will come back to you.”

Whitney has four children, all grown. She tried to instill in them, by example, the importance of being benevolent.

“I helped raise 13 kids because nine of them nobody else wanted. That was when my kids were growing up. I never had fewer than seven kids at my house.”

She doesn’t expect to be thanked or recognized for her charitable efforts.

“If you do something to get a thank you, you’ve done it for the wrong reason,” she said. “We should do it because it’s the right thing to do.”

A seemingly happy woman, Whitney advises others to shuffle off unhappiness.

“From the moment we are born, we have good things and hurtful things that come into our lives,” she said. “We’d like to take all those hurts and put them into a bag and carry it around in our soul and weigh it down. That’s why we have despair. Let it go. We can’t change what we had for breakfast this morning. Why look back? Put all this stuff down and look ahead.”

With that, she pulled away from the curb and headed north on Front Street toward Skowhegan.

Amy Calder has been a Morning Sentinel reporter 34 years. Her columns appear here weekly. She is the author of the book “Comfort is an Old Barn,” a collection of her curated columns, published in 2023 by Islandport Press. She may be reached at acalder@centralmaine.com. For previous Reporting Aside columns, go to centralmaine.com.