To all our Free Press readers, a very Happy New Year! The Front Page will be back on Monday, but don’t worry: We’ve got plenty of delights for you to read while you nurse your sore heads. This week we rounded up our favorite Free Press stories of 2025, shared our New Year’s resolutions, and made our predictions for 2026. And today, we’re publishing the latest personal essay by Larissa Phillips, who recalls a dark and stormy night, 30 years ago, when she put her fate in the hands of strangers. Scroll down to read it. Oh, and this afternoon, you’ll get the next installment of Tough Love—in which Abigail Shrier writes to a woman who’s wondering if she can fall back in love with her husband. Buckle up! —The Editors
My grandmother, who lived on a tiny island 30 miles off the coast of Massachusetts, always had an extra bed available. If the house was full, she opened the foldout cots in the back of her rambling workshop. “There’s always room for one more,” she would say, pulling out sheets and blankets within seconds of getting a phone call from her church or the chamber of commerce, alerting her to stranded tourists who had missed the last boat or some other lost souls. In the morning, the accidental guests would sit at her tiny kitchen table for coffee, Jiffy baked muffins, and a whole lot of stories.
My grandmother probably considered this part of her Christian service, but the concept of welcoming those in need into your home is older than Christ. The Greeks called it xenia: the sacred duty to host a stranger. Without inns or hotels to host the traveler who’d wandered off course or suffered some misfortune—and with so many dangers afoot—this practice was a civilizational necessity thousands of years ago. Thank goodness we’ve passed those dangerous times. By now, with motels along every highway and smartphones and credit cards in everyone’s pocket, we’re safer than ever.
But we’re also more alone. This might seem contradictory, but back when cars broke down more often, when we got lost because we didn’t have the right map, or stranded because we forgot to check the weather—and maybe we just weren’t as smart as we are now about avoiding danger—the need to rely on strangers actually made the world a smaller, friendlier place. I know because of something that happened to me, on a dark and stormy night, 30 years ago.
