When my good friend Dorothy “Dottie” Boddaert who lives and walks everywhere in downtown turned 90 this week, she made me a scarf.

Knitted out of super-soft dark gray yarn, which she proclaimed to be my “favorite color” because I always wear black, the scarf is a real gift from the heart.

She has also made Frank Connors, the membership coordinator here at People Plus, a pair of socks. They’re his favorite to wear when he’s padding about the house on a chilly morning.

You might see Dottie on her walker, meandering between the People Plus Center, Hannaford, Curtis Memorial Library and her apartment, as she enjoys her quiet life in this lively community we call Brunswick.

As a regular fixture and volunteer at the center, she was recently heard chatting about her “past life” in Massachusetts, and said she had moved here a few years ago to get away from the big city and “settle down for the next decade or so.”

She then said that People Plus has been her savior — and that she’d never felt more warmly welcomed in a community.

I love Dorothy and her scarf and her cute little British accent, and her story got me thinking about what community really means.

The dictionary says it is a group of people with shared interests or social values, but it feels like more than that to me.

For instance, I walked into the center this week and the café was full of beautiful evergreen arrangements donated by the Bath Garden Club for the Meals on Wheels program.

Since we deliver more than 300 meals every week to homebound participants, the club wanted to send a bit of holiday cheer along with all the meals this week.

We saw community this past week through the sad and heartfelt grief of our teens who are mourning the loss of a Morse High School freshman who took her own life. Most of them never met her in person but know her through this community. We had an outpouring of consoling gestures to ease their pain and help them understand. So while grieving, the teens are being cared for by their community.

And when Senator Angus King agreed to write the foreword for Frank Connors’ new book of People Plus News columns written over the last 10 years, that was certainly community. Home for the holiday, the Senator took more than a few minutes out of his busy day — and away from the federal budget! — to read many of Frank’s columns and summed them up quite nicely as a “Valentine to Maine’s Mid-coast.”

In fact, the entire book is about this community and the effect we all have on each other. We see it every day at the center, through the small acts of kindness as people bring in food for the teens, donate coats to seniors, fill our food-pantry boxes or volunteer to take a “little old lady” to the grocery store or the doctor.

And we see it in the larger acts of kindness from people like the Morrells, Healings and Jim Howard, in support from Bowdoin College, Mid Coast Hospital and the partnership of hundreds of individuals and businesses.

I feel like after two years on the job, I can finally see the big picture of the role that People Plus plays in our community.

We are the center that builds community by enabling retired adults, teens and everyone in between to come together through helping others, or by sharing a meal, playing a game or taking a class. That is the core essence of community and it is what defines us all.

And I very clearly see the role that this community plays in supporting People Plus. We wouldn’t be here without it.

So as we all pause at this time of year to give thanks, my thanks goes out to the members of this community who take care of others. You know who you are. You are an incredibly valuable commodity and we all are the better because of you.

STACY FRIZZLE is executive director of People Plus, based in Brunswick.