The view from out our kitchen windows has already changed this spring. Well before the poplars and the swamp maples have begun to fuzz up, our landscape has suddenly been transformed; things look very different to us today than they did a few weeks ago. This spring, it may be that nature will watch humanity go through profound changes in the weeks of lengthening days.
It is never a bad idea to begin a day by counting our blessings. We have clean air, clean water, a rich and abundant landscape, and neighbors who are not only good people, but by and large are capable as well. We have a heritage hereabouts that combines hard work, practicality, inventiveness, and what they called in lyceum days “a higher culture.” Like a lot of the things we love most, we can tend to take these things for granted; but now and in the future our lives are likely to depend upon them.
If the present crisis was to end tomorrow, we would still be faced with profound questions about the way we have come to live our lives in the modern era. The answers may not be blowing in the wind as much as they will be in working on the land that once fed a goodly part of Massachusetts and is going to have to do so again. Our farmers have been struggling for years, not because we all haven’t been eating three meals a day, but because we have fallen into the habit of shopping out of parking lots where large trucks carry our food in from long distances and Brinks trucks carry our money off to be deposited in faraway places.
Now is the time for each of us in our homes, our neighborhoods, and our towns, to reckon how we want to proceed in the coming months. We can wait for things to return to “normalcy,” as Warren G. Harding put it. Or we can take this opportunity now to do the things that we already knew were going to have to do in the next decade or so. And that involves making a real commitment to act as families and as neighbors to determine now what we want on our Thanksgiving tables and where it is going to come from, and for whatever powers that be to organize and to supply solid resources to our farmers now as they begin to plan for spring planting, breeding, and harvest. If there are business subsidies around for cruise lines and airlines, there ought to be some solid market insurance available for farmers. We need to think differently. Now is the time, if ever there was one, for us to return to the idea of being “customers” of local farmers and businesses rather than “consumers” of whatever advertising messages are being rained down upon us from “on high.”
Because there is another message coming to us from “on high.” A whole lot of blood, sweat, and tears have been expended over the course of four centuries, hereabouts, in the interest of making our hills and valleys peaceable and productive places. We have an inheritance here that was left to us by people who survived immigration, wars, and depressions, as well as small pox, diphtheria, the Spanish flu, and polio. In many cases, their most important tools were faith, neighborliness, and hard work. We might begin to think of the simple act of living locally as a debt we need to pay to ourselves as well as a legacy we will leave to our children and grandchildren. “Living long and prospering” is not an idea that came out of a sci-fi script in the 1970s, it is a way of life that has been practiced here for generations that is ours to embrace again, if we have the will to do so.
Thomas S. Curren is the executive director of the Franklin Land Trust in Shelburne Falls.