Here are some brief thoughts on recent happenings in Franklin County and the North Quabbin region.
It was a close call for a dog that had bounded out onto McLeod Pond in Colrain and fallen through thin ice. Owner Dr. Richard Warner of Buckland wisely called 911.
Dog lovers can well imagine Warner’s heart-stopping anxiety as he witnessed his 9-year-old pet flailing, strength ebbing, in her icy prison. “You feel very helpless because there was nothing, really, I could do up there by myself,” said Warner.
Donning dry suits and life preservers, two Colrain firefighters responded with a collapsible ladder that they used to crawl roughly 20 yards across the ice and pull the dog from the water in the nick of time. They carried the dog, too weak to stand, in a sling to a waiting ambulance, where first responders used heated blankets to treat Dixie for hypothermia.
What matters more than life itself? Nothing — not squabbles, rivalries or grudges. Dixie lives, and we rejoice.
Kids learn the power of a letter by writing to Santa via the special mailbox in Bernardston’s Cushman Park, where every letter gets answered.
“In today’s world,” Kiwanis Club member Tom Mann said, “with everything being email and text and SMS, it’s kind of neat and old-fashioned for kids to even write a letter.” And then, when they get a letter in return, “they know that Santa’s spirit is real,” is how Mann put it.
To this category, we would add sympathy cards, birthday greetings and get-well wishes as worth a stamp.
Members of the Opioid Task Force of Franklin County and North Quabbin convened for their third annual Sober Housing Summit Friday, where they learned about two sober housing projects in southern Vermont that came together in two vacant motels. Think about it: the former check-in area offers a community space for people to come together, and the former rooms provide a safe place for people in recovery before they make a transition to permanent housing.
As Rhianna Kendrick, director of operations at the Groundworks Collaborative, put it, “It’s meant to get people into housing and then wrap support around them.”
Making it happen is the challenge. “It can be a complicated process to apply for funding that includes many applications and a lot of compliance,” Elizabeth Bridgewater of Windham and Windsor Housing Trust told participants.
But Opioid Task Force co-chairs Sheriff Christopher Donelan, Attorney and Register of Probate John F. Merrigan and Northwestern District Attorney David E. Sullivan and their membership have notched big victories in their tool belt since the task force’s creation in 2013, such as implementing the first-in-the-country medically-assisted treatment program for opioid-addicted inmates at the jail and its new 24/7 opioid rapid overdose response team that is expected to launch by early 2021.
The annual Sober Housing Summit is an acknowledgement that “the biggest barrier for people who are struggling is housing,” as Heather Bialecki-Canning, executive director of the North Quabbin. Community Coalition, put it.
Donelan’s suggestion to guest speaker Shawn Hayden that they take a ride up the Mohawk Trail sometime soon to look at old or abandoned motels is a hopeful step toward addressing this heretofore intractable problem.
For everyone chafing at the restrictions of COVID-19 safety precautions, Friday’s obituary for Carol Purington of Colrain documented a life well lived from the front parlor of an old farmhouse. Despite being flat on her back, breathing with the assistance of ventilators since she was felled by polio as a first-grader in 1955, Purington was a writer, poet, lover of nature, Distinguished Alumnus of Greenfield Community College, family member and part of a vast local and online community who knew her as a cheerful and empathetic friend.
From her obituary: “Polio may have crippled Carol’s body, but it didn’t control her mind or spirit. Carol’s legacy is a testament to the indomitability of the human spirit. For someone so physically challenged, yet so accomplished as a writer and a person, she should be an inspiration to all to strive in spite of what limitations we have, to make the best of the life we are given.”