This afternoon, Maria and I drove past the Cambridge Livestock Auction on Route 22 in Cambridge, N.Y.,  just as a giant truck was bringing in a new woodshed I knew was for Amy McLenithan’s customers to sit in as the cold weather approaches.

I dropped Maria off at the farmhouse and rushed back over to Amy McLenithan’s Country Kitchen with my camera.

I knew her husband and some friends had just hauled the shed halfway across the country and set it on cinderblocks and gravel. It’s a place for the farmers and passersby to eat and be warm in the winter.

When I got there, Amy was just pulling up and seeing the shed for the first time. I think I might have been more excited than she was, but I couldn’t be sure.

Amy doesn’t show a lot of emotion.

She just opened her Country Kitchen Red Wagon a few weeks ago and has dreams of a place where people can eat and be warm all through the winter. I hope to be there often.

I’ve noticed that as people get older, they often make their lives smaller, or they make their lives bigger.  We call it “downsizing” – a creepy name to me.

The idea of downsizing a human life, always repugnant to me, is commonplace as people head into and past middle age. It’s what is expected of us, what we are taught to do.

We are supposed to slow down, do less, save up for the final drama of life, pay off mortgages, live in smaller houses with fewer heating costs and no big lawns to maintain.

Take no more risks, avoid falls, play it safe, squirrel away some money.

That is the popular and commonplace American idea of growing older, the point of life seems to be to get to safety and hunker down for the final chapters and wait for the end.

I am not one of those people, my life has grown larger by the year, and I have not yet come to my horizon. Does this make me a hero? I don’t think so. The thing I most fear is the shrinking life,  so it takes no courage to avoid one.

It’s great to be safe and have a big fat bank account,  bless those who do, but that alone does not translate into a life worth living for me. Don’t ask me about my health or my IRA’s. Ask me how I’m living my life.

Amy McLenithan has served food inside the livestock auction for 20 years, she can’t say exactly why she undertook this seismic shift and expansion in her life at the midpoint as her kids are heading off to college.

She just wanted to do something more.

My own heroes are the unseen people who choose to make things better, for themselves, for others beyond just making money. Sometimes they do it in small ones, sometimes they do it in large ways.

They endure, they persevere.

It was Woody Guthrie and his music that first raised the idea for me that there is much-unheralded heroism in the lives of ordinary people.  Our sometimes angry and often violent culture usually associates heroism with valor in war, our mega movies and politicians all follow suit.

I think he was right when he said this country was their country.

Bruce Springsteen often celebrated farmers and working-class people in his music.

The real heroes of the world,  he said, are people who work hard, pay their bills, feed their families, keep their pride and ambition.

A hero in our world is usually celebrated as a man or woman who sacrifices himself to save the lives of others in war or extreme danger. But what about the people who sacrifice themselves in the service of a meaningful life, of fulfillment? There are no medals for them.

I have often been drawn to the idea of the hero as being something broader than that, something you won’t see on the news or see TV shows about or learn about in books.

A hero to me is an ordinary individual who finds the strength and will to persevere and endure in spite of daunting, even overwhelming,  obstacles, and who rejects the lure of comfort and safety to give something of their lives to something bigger than themselves. Who dares to step out of themselves.

In Hollywood or Greek Drama, someone who opens a food cart and acquires adjoining dining shed in a livestock auction parking lot is not likely to soon be a motion picture near you.

But there is something stirring about it to me.

Amy showed me inside of her new shed today, she was proud and excited. She was already figuring out how to get a windbreaker of some kind up between her cart – where people order the food – and her new shed – where they can eat it in the comfort of a warm space.

Amy is a farmer, I don’t mean to paint her as a saint.

But she knows what she is walking into standing in a mostly unheated cart all day by herself in sub-zero temperatures, heavy snow, and driving winds. She and I both know what that means.

“There’s room for four tables in here,” she said with some pride, taking in her new annex, pointing out where the insulation is going. “I’ve just got to find a way for people to be warm when they order and get the food back to the shed.”  It’s only about five or six feet, I said, maybe a plastic tent?

I laughed, I am not one to make constructive construction suggestions. She plans to talk with her husband about the windbreaker tonight.

She is sure he will have some ideas for her.

I have no doubt that this windbreaker will be there before the hard winter comes. I don’t know Amy well, but I like and respect her.

I was excited for her today, and I could sense her own excitement. That seems not only admirable to me but healthy. It felt like she was doing something important. She has a lot to get up for in the morning.

She seems to me to have a lot of character. She is a plain talker and hard worker.

I have not forgotten that our country was built by people like that, they made their lives bigger, not smaller, as best as they could for as long as they could.