Today is the first day of Spring. It is glorious and the whole town is out walking. You cannot help but lean into the warmth of the sun. Every time I try to head into the house, I find myself heading right back outside again. Over the course of the day I have felt the earth stretching, rolling its shoulders, melting, freeing up. Inch by inch, the muddy ground is more exposed.
Everywhere there are the sounds of winter loosening its hold — snow sliding in sheets off steaming roofs, landing in a “plop” like great white cow patties; icicles crashing off buildings like a bevy of spears; water running off to lower ground. From any elevated point you can see the ice leaving the harbor. The birds are chirping giddily, the kids are revving their engines in frantic loops around the town. It’s beginning to look as if we have survived another island winter.
I try not to get into those delineations concerning “summer people” and “year-rounders.” I understand that those who have been away from the island have missed it, and have had their struggles too. But this spring, more so than many others, I am feeling like that adage: “…if you can’t take the winters, you don’t deserve the summers” has a profound truth to it. It has been a hard winter. Right now I’m feeling selfish about sharing even one beautiful sunny summer day with anyone who did not pay their dues.
I read a book once about the Inuit people of the far north, and how they went as entire families, entire villages, out onto “the land” to follow their food sources. The story told of how anyone too old, or too sickly, would ask the others to build them a small shelter, to leave them behind, rather than have them slow up the clan. I feel as if we were forced to leave many of our people out on the ice this year.
Since the first of October, to the middle of March, we have lost 14 members of our community. Proportionally, that comes to about one out of every one hundred. I can guarantee you that each of those 14 touched the lives of at least 100 others. So at times, especially in the dark months, it has felt as if there was a collective grieving and a collective huddling together.
This year, for some strange reason, a lot of the sadness and hard times affected our very young island children. We grieve their loss of innocence and our inability to shield them. We rejoice in their resilience and forthrightness as they come to terms with personal and world disasters; creating cards for classmates and holding bake sales to send money to children in tsunami-torn countries.
There is a lot of business and busyness that goes on in winter here: a lot of meetings and haggling, planning and considering, budgets and town meetings to prepare for. It is hard to describe adequately, but right around February the real intensity of life within the tribe becomes palpable. It feels as if we are inhaling and exhaling, sneezing and blowing our noses, in unison. It is hardly necessary to talk because our thoughts are so intertwined. It is claustrophobic and uniquely comforting. There is a steady flow of pies and casseroles going from ovens to doorsteps. A pile of firewood, albeit spruce, magically appears in the yard. The walk is shoveled by an elf, the road plowed by some 4 a.m. sprite. The community has extra time on its hands and mostly spends it doing covert kindnesses to one another.
A few weeks ago, after a light snowfall covered the existing ice, I broke all previous winter records by falling down four times in one day. One of my falls was with a new, almost two-year-old friend of mine. I had forgotten how much a small child weighs and how much they can throw you off balance, disturb your center of gravity, how distracting they can be. I also forgot that you cannot walk down a sidewalk with a small child on your back without eliciting a steady banter from adults passing by. We become palavering fools in our desire to make a child laugh or grace us with a smile. They serve as our small Buddhas, reminding us, no matter the season, to treat each other gently, that we are all a little new, a little green, a little raw.
Karen Roberts Jackson lives on Green’s Island.