08/26/2026
Broken Shovels may have begun, just a tiny little seed planted, when I was four years old, sitting beside my grandpa’s record player, listening to Dolly Parton sing about two little orphans outside in the cold.
I have never said that out loud before. I don’t think I understood it until today.
My grandpa had the 45 single of “Here You Come Again.” On the other side was a song called “Me and Little Andy.”
In his great big family room, he had one of those beautiful old console record players, the kind that looked like an enormous piece of furniture and could automatically begin the record again when it reached the end. I would listen to that song for hours and hours.
“Me and Little Andy” tells the story of a little girl and her puppy arriving at a stranger’s door on a bitterly cold night. They are hungry, freezing and alone, and they ask to come inside.
But the theme stuck with me: Someone small and vulnerable was out in the cold. Someone heard them asking for help. And someone opened the door.
My nickname was Andee, which made the record feel as though it had somehow been made especially for me.
But Dolly gave me and generations of children who grew up without much money something even greater than that. Through the stories she told about poverty, her family and the mountains where she came from, she made poor kids feel that we belonged to something.
She never treated poverty as proof that someone was less intelligent, less worthy or less capable of becoming extraordinary. She showed us that there was dignity in where we came from and that wealth had very little to do with the measure of a life.
Throughout her long career, Dolly returned again and again to the same belief that would eventually become the heart of Broken Shovels: when everything else is stripped away, compassion and kindness are what truly matter.
I didn’t know the words sanctuary, rehabilitation or rescue when I was sitting beside that record player. But Dolly was already teaching me what they meant.
Someone vulnerable is outside the door. You let them in.
Over the past fifteen years, I have opened my door to hundreds of little orphans. Mine have not been human children standing on a porch. They have arrived covered in mud, blood, flies or the remnants of their own broken shells. They have been abandoned lambs, motherless calves, newborn rats, infant mice, pigeons, sparrows, bottle puppies and kittens and countless other tiny lives already failed by the world.
And I have had more than a warm bowl of porridge to offer them. There have been incubators and oxygen chambers, syringes and feeding tubes, fluids and medicines. There have been countless nights spent trying to persuade one tiny body to remain in this world until morning.
But underneath all of it, the story has always been the same:
Someone small and vulnerable arrived at the door. And someone opened it.
I don’t know whether Broken Shovels would exist without that little girl sitting beside her grandpa’s record player, listening to Dolly Parton tell that heartbreaking story again and again.
I don’t know whether every orphan I have held since has been, in some small way, another Little Andy whom I was determined to help make it safely through the night.
But I know that before I was old enough to give goodness a name, Dolly Parton taught me what it looked like.
Today, the world lost Dolly. And I am only now realizing that I may owe her one of the deepest and most important thank-yous of my life.
The best way I know to thank her is to do what Dolly did: turn compassion into action. So, in her memory, I am asking each of us to perform one deliberate act of kindness, large or small.
Feed someone. Protect someone. Give what you can. Open a book for a child. Open the door for an animal. Help a stranger. Forgive someone. Notice a life the rest of the world has overlooked.
Let’s call it “Do It Like Dolly.”
Do one compassionate thing in her honor, and then invite someone else to do the same. It does not need to be grand, public or expensive. It only needs to make this world a little gentler for someone else.
Dolly spent her life reminding us that kindness is not weakness or sentiment. It is a choice. It is an action. And in the end, it may be the only thing we leave behind that truly matters.
Thank you, Dolly, from little Andee, and from every orphan whose knock I have heard because you taught me to listen.
Somewhere, someone small is still outside the door.
May we all keep opening it.
