Several of our readers who subscribe via email feed, said they didn’t receive Jim Klobuchar’s most recent post, so we’ve reposted it below … enjoy.

A Post by Jim Klobuchar, To read other ‘Changing Aging’ posts by Jim, go here:

I prowled my clothes racks and book shelves the other day. I rushed into the garage and dived into duffel bags clogged with 40-years worth of hiking gear. Boots and sweaters and four sets of wool underwear flew into the adjacent laundry room. I raided the cedar closet and produced three unused throw rugs from Peru.

I was in a scavenging frenzy and it was charged with guilt. Before my wife called in professional therapy, I explained this sudden frenzy.

A few weeks ago the Minneapolis Star Tribune told the story of Fran Heitzman, an 83-year-old-retired small businessman, a friend-of-humanity kind of guy, who was helping a single mother and her young daughter stock their kitchen.

He was adding some utensils to one of the trays when the girl exclaimed to her mother: “Just think, mom, now we won’t have to share spoons when we eat.”

When he got home Heitzman opened the kitchen drawers and liberated five sets of silver he and his wife didn’t need. It was the beginning of an expanding service now called Bridging. The idea is for thousands of people wading in stuff they no longer use€”particularly furniture€”to stock it in a warehouse in suburban Bloomington , where it’s put it into the hands of people who need. Anybody can play. Right now it’s become a furniture store for more than 5,700 struggling families.

I thought about my own too-much-stuff again a few days later when a woman speaking in church told of visiting Guatamala by bus with other church members. They drove through a village, looking at the scenes of poverty, and then someone said, “let’s get out of the bus,” an emotional summons to meet these people, hands-on and to look into their eyes not with pity but with a promise of befriending.

What I know from my travel is that these people want to lift their lives and their children’s lives. I know it from the hundreds I have seen and met and now have written about in a book called “The Miracles of Barefoot Capitalism. It tells of the millions of poor but ambitious women around the world who build tiny businesses with loans as small as $50, loans that have to be repaid, and are at the astonishing rate of 97 percent.

But something else touched me deeper. Most of them are illiterate but they receive training in disease prevention, family planning and more. I attended the weekly meeting of a group of 30 women in Kathmandu, Nepal. A woman applied for a third loan. She had been signing the application form by using an inkpad and her thumb print. On this day she laboriously scrawled her name, for the first time. And then she stood and looked at the signature, and cried. She could write her name! Now, at the age of 50. And all of the women gathered around her, hugged her, and cried with her.

And so did I.