Kindness comes full circle in all different sizes for Litchfield woman

Frances Bargiel can’t help but tear up when she thinks about how total strangers helped her family, natives of Poland, survive.

In the 1870s, her family lived in a poor village in a one-room, batch-roof house with a dirt floor — all six children fit in the house with a cow in the wintertime so it wouldn’t freeze.

“She said if it wasn’t for the Jewish people who brought bread and milk for them, they would have starved,” Bargiel said of what her mother told her. “When I think that someone was so kind to my family, I could cry, because God has given me so much that I just want to share a little bit of it.”

The New Castle, Penn., widow now lives at The Lakes at Litchfield where Mackenzie Stroupe, activity director at the retirement community, said she’s one of the more involved residents.

“Some of the residents like to sit back and are like, ‘Whatever y’all want to do, we’ll either show up or we won’t,’” Stroupe said. “But Frances is not like that. She wants to be in the middle of everything. She wants to help plan... She just really wants to make this place the best possible place to live for her and for all the other residents.”

Stroupe said Bargiel spent many years organizing craft sales for her church, raising thousands of dollars through lots of hard work and creativity.

“What’s so great about Mrs. Frances is that she didn’t stop at retirement,” Stroupe said. “This past year she organized a resident-run flea market called Fran’s Flea Market.”

A portion of the proceeds she makes from Fran’s Flea Market goes to charities like the Wounded Warrior Project and a portion of it she keeps for things like floral arrangements and to buy snacks for other residents.

“She has worked so hard to get this thing up and running, gathering donations from employees and other residents, organizing people with computers to make advertising fliers, directing people to set up tables for her and making many of the items that she sells,” Stroupe said. “She even saves her Bingo prizes to add to her table for a little something extra. She collects, organizes and prices all of her items storing them in her room until Saturday mornings when she sets up her table in our busiest living room, displaying everything...

“Not only does she dedicate several hours of her Saturday mornings, but she spends countless hours throughout each week scouring magazines for new ideas and making craft items to sell, such as knitted hats and scarves, floral arrangements and other crafty items she puts together with things most people would have thrown away. It’s so great how she has really pulled the whole community together to get this thing going and I think it really gives the other residents a sense of pride by being able to take part in it.”

Bargiel said part of her motivation is seeing others get involved.

“I taught them how to make these little boxes out of used greeting cards, and then we pack candy in them and tie ribbons on them and they use them as little favors,” Bargiel said. “But to see the joy when you teach someone to do something is pleasing to me. And it doesn’t cost them anything, but it brings joy.

“You know, it isn’t all the monetary things that bring us joy. It’s what we do when we do something for another person. You say, ‘Oh thank God they taught me how to do this’ to help someone and to cheer someone up.”

Bargiel believes the kindness shown to her family more than 130 years ago is being paid back by the kindness she and her family shows to others. That kindness was signified in a package she received Dec. 17, a gesture honoring her late husband, Bernie. Bernie was an usher at a Maryland church and would help rock a baby to sleep when the baby’s mother tried everything to calm her.

“From that day on, when she got to fussing, Bernie would go over and say let me take her in the back,” Bargiel said. “Well that little girl is now a teenager. And her mother is Italian and bakes the best Italian cookies on Earth. In that package I received was a box of her Italian cookies. A gift that I get every Christmas. All those years that Bernie’s been dead, and I am still getting cookies... When I look at this box, I could almost cry.”

This story was originally published December 20, 2015 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Kindness comes full circle in all different sizes for Litchfield woman."