Tasha Wellman’s life is hard but she doesn’t give up, no matter how bad things get.

Wellman, 40, lives in a tent in the woods with her husband, Michael Hanson, after living on and off at the Mid-Maine Homeless Shelter in Waterville the last two years.

I met Wellman on Tuesday at the Waterville Area Soup Kitchen where she had come to get takeout meals — white chili, salad, bread and butter, and a dessert — to bring back to the tent. She couldn’t talk long because someone was coming to pick her up to drive her to a junkyard where she planned to sell some metal, wire and other items she and her husband had collected around the city.

“We do everything — we bottle pick, my husband is a jack-of-all-trades. He does dry-walling, painting. He works on vehicles and does budworm digging to sell for fishing bait. I did budworm digging but I got bitten and I’m allergic and swell up. It’s really, really good money.”

A thin woman with long blonde hair and green eyes, Wellman was open about the struggles she and her husband have endured. Together 18 years, the couple has four boys, ages 22, 21, 12 and 10, she said. The two older ones are on their own and the younger children are staying with her husband’s mother in Richmond, she said.

Wellman attended Erskine Academy in China many years ago but didn’t finish, she said. She eventually went back to school in Wiscasset and earned her GED diploma.

“Michael grew up  in Richmond. I grew up in Whitefield. We had a home in Whitefield until six years ago. We had it for 12 years.”

She said they were paying on the house with the intention of owning it and nearly had it paid for when they got a notice to vacate in 30 days. It was a complicated legal issue with the house ownership and it was foreclosed on and they and their four children had to leave, she said.

“We thought it was our forever home. Now, me and my husband are literally falling apart and if something doesn’t break soon, we’re probably not going to be together much longer. He just feels like he failed. He’s depressed. When things are hard, we take it out on each other. It seems like we get five steps ahead and we go 20 steps back.”

The couple has very little, and count on the soup kitchen, located at 38 College Ave., for food.

“It’s a huge help,” Wellman said. “This place is a lifesaver.”

She said Carla Caron, who runs the soup kitchen, saves lives, not just by providing food to guests but by listening compassionately to their stories and trying to help them.

“Carla is the most caring woman. I don’t know how she does it. She just makes miracles happen. She loves everybody. She adores everybody. She has such a big heart. I don’t know how she has room in there for everyone and everything.”

Caron and her crew were working Tuesday on cleaning and closing the place up after the 12:30 p.m. meal. They open at 8 a.m. for a light breakfast also. Recently on a Friday, they gave out 620 meals — a significant increase from the typical 370 daily average, Caron said.

“That tells me that people are running out of money before they run out of month,” she said. “They’re eating here or they get our to-go meals. Those are the bulk of the meals that we serve — between 250 and 350 to-go.”

With a $16,000 monthly budget paid for with grants and donations, the kitchen operates with the help of amazing volunteers who show up every day, Caron said. She said housing is desperately needed for people like Wellman.

“She is such a beautiful soul,” Caron said. “She is very kind. I think she has a lot of pain from trauma but she always seems to smile at people or have kind things to say. I just wish we had more options for people, for housing.”

Before Wellman left the kitchen Tuesday to meet her ride in the parking lot, I asked where she hoped to be in five years.

“I want to have family together in a house with a whole bunch of love and happiness,” she said. “I want our family back. That’s all we want.”

Amy Calder has been a Morning Sentinel reporter 37 years. Her columns appear here Sundays. 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 [email protected]. For previous Reporting Aside columns, go to centralmaine.com