When snow fell on my hometown in Massachusetts, kids used Flexible Flyer sleds, wooden toboggans, metal discs, rubber inner tubes, plastic dishpans and their daddies’ coal shovels to sail down the snow-covered hills. I thought I’d seen everything in the way of sledding vessels until I moved to Maryland years later and witnessed a shower curtain deployed for this purpose. It was a middle-aged woman from Baltimore’s Little Italy who showed us how that was done.

This column is about something I suspect a lot of Americans might identify with — the great blessings and feelings of gratitude that come with finding a home away from home and having strangers treat you as family. But first … about the shower curtain.