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How many meals can you eke out of a frozen quarter-chicken from the food bank? How many tacos from its shredded meat? How many bowls of soup from its bones?
How many days can you go without having to hit the coin-op laundry? How long can you avoid spending $4 for a load if you hand-wash your underwear and T-shirts and hang them to dry in the bathroom?
How many months will the exhaustion linger after surviving COVID-19? Will walking to the mailbox ever again not feel like a trek up a steep mountain?
These are the daily worries of a woman I talked to this week as the National Guard descended on Washington and America reeled from an attack on our Capitol — while all over our country thousands of households face bread-and-butter security crises that also are grave, with people out of work and sick and unable to pay their rents and hungry and desperately in need of help from a federal government long otherwise occupied.