MASHPEE

MY FRIEND JEAN went grocery shopping the other week. She had a ball. She bought four slices of roast beef, some bananas and even some cheese. She couldn’t get over how much fun it was to go into a store and buy a few of these “luxury” items.

The cause of her good fortune? Her Food Stamps went up from $11 to $40. A month, not a week. She couldn’t believe her good luck.

Jean has cancer and is almost 80. She lives in house she grew up in, in Falmouth. It’s a small cottage that her mother, a Portuguese immigrant, managed to buy long ago, when she first came to this country, before Jean was born. When Jean was growing up, the family had no running water, no indoor toilet and no electricity. Her job as a child was to walk into town to get the things the family needed. It was a long walk, several miles over unpaved dirt roads. When she was older, she rode her bike.

After Jean inherited her mother’s cottage, she and her husband fixed it up themselves. Now it’s a tidy, warm, small but very comfortable little abode. Recently she had the windows worked on, to help save on her heating expenses.

Her husband’s ashes are buried in the yard. Vern died about 10 years ago. Since then, Jean has been surviving on much less than $1,000 a month. Vern had a pension, but almost none of that transferred to his wife. To make ends meet, she spends her mornings patroling Cape Cod roadsides, picking up discarded cans and bottles at 5 cents each. Every nickel find is a treasure to her.

The important thing to know about my friend Jean is that she worked all her life, full time. Beginning at age 13. She picked vegetables for local farmers. She worked in, and eventually became the manager of, a Mashpee convenience store. She worked for the local water department. There was never a time when she didn’t work full time until she had to retire.

But Cape Cod jobs don’t pay much. Never have. Her Social Security check amounts to less than $600. That leaves her housebound — not because she’s ill, she can’t afford gasoline.

The community pitches in a lot. When it snows, someone plows her drive. An old friend of her husband honors his memory by taking care of Jean’s rusty old car. He keeps it going with tape and a large helping of good will. You have to be careful, though, because she steadfastly refuses anything that looks, even a little bit, like a handout.

We figure we owe her. When Jean was working, she was always helping others. I live near the Mashpee River, where I have kayaked for nearly 30 years. Decades ago, a developer, who managed to make himself a fortune by covering Cape Cod with huge houses for the ultra-rich, wanted to turn one whole bank of the river into house lots and a golf course.

He didn’t get his way. Jean, who has only a high-school education, was a town selectman then. She moved heaven and earth to get the land turned into a nature preserve. Birds love the place. There’s also a rather large human fan club. Thousands of people each year enjoy the Mashpee Woodlands. They don’t have to pay to do so, either. Access is free, even if you don’t have the money to join a private club.

Another person who has a house on Cape Cod is Richard Syron. Richard’s house is not like Jean’s. It’s in Osterville. Richard’s 10-room house sits is on Bump’s River, which leads into Nantucket Sound, where Cape Wind, the wind farm, may eventually be built. The house and land are assessed at more than $1 million. Richard’s Osterville abode is his “holiday home.”

This past summer, Richard, inconvenienced, had to leave his “holiday home” early.

He had to head back to New York to try to put out a financial fire. Richard was the chief executive of Freddie Mac, the captain at the helm when that ship went down, taking so many passengers along with it. In 2007, while he was running his company aground, he earned $1.2 million in salary, along with a $3.45 million bonus. He was also awarded more than $14 million in stock, and $771,585 in other kinds of compensation.

As we all know, things haven’t gone so well at this mortgage company. So Richard was invited to leave his New York job. He was supposed to get a multimillion-dollar “golden parachute,” but I don’t know if he’ll get it or not. Right now it’s not kosher to give men like Richard large going-away presents. I’m not worried about him though: He’ll surface again. Somewhere. Somehow.

The Richard Syrons of this world will always be with us. Americans like Jean, though, are an endangered species. They are also the backbone of this nation. We ignore and mistreat them at our own peril.

One last thing about Jean’s house: Some of us suggested that she get a reverse mortgage. Then she won’t have to worry about grocery shopping.

She refuses. The property instead has been given to the town land trust. That way, when she dies, the people and the birds will have another place to enjoy.

Wendy Williams is a Cape Cod-based science writer.