Editorial: The springing of the year
Two friends, bundled up against a cutting wind Monday afternoon, passed each other in the Center walking on either side of Route 114. “They say snow,” one called to the other, which caused the friend to put her hands over her ears and say, “Don’t say that word.”
The weatherman’s prediction was wrong, although it still felt that February, like a gloomy house guest, had moved in for good. But spring has sprung, at least according to the calendar, arriving the middle of last week. You could have fooled us.
How soon we forget that spring is, among other things, the season that requires patience to appreciate.
If summer is the season of freedom, autumn the time of reflection and winter a time to hunker down and count our blessings, then spring is the season of possibility. It’s a time when hope, the virtue Emily Dickinson described as “the thing with feathers that perches in the soul,” isn’t an abstract concept but something relayed to our senses from life.
The feathered things called ospreys have announced the season by returning to the Island and now are riding the winds above us, their long, silent flights reminders of long, effortless days to come.
The spring time moveable feasts of the two great western religions, Easter and Passover, have arrived close together this year. One commemorates resurrection and renewal; the other celebrates the principle of forging ahead into freedom through the powers of community, faith and justice. These concepts are so deep within most of us that we can’t give words to them, but are present in our appreciation of the changing seasonal light and trees in bud.
The summer game begins in spring, and Shelter Island School’s boys varsity baseball team is back in action. The Mets are in Florida for spring training and if there was ever a symbol of the power of hope, the Amazin’s are it. Fans look at the Met’s roster of green youths and graying veterans — just one blown-out rotator cuff from new careers as casino greeters — and see only a legendary march to a championship season.
No matter if we stop and linger at an afternoon pick-up game of kids banging a softball against a freshening sky or go to the cathedral-like setting of Yankee Stadium for a game under the lights, we receive an emotion that John Fogerty put into song: “Well, beat the drum and hold the phone, the sun came out today/We’re born again, there’s new grass on the field.”
At Sylvester Manor Friday night there was a screening of a film, “Growing Farmers,” about the movement on the East End of people — many of them young with no background in agriculture — farming the land on small plots. A lively discussion after the screening covered topics such as building a sustainable system of food in our community while walking lightly on the earth.
There was a sing-along to end the evening and the venerable Manor House swelled with many voices singing an old English farming hymn.
It’s just as easy to say the Manor swelled with hope.
