Here are some brief thoughts on recent happenings in Franklin County and the North Quabbin region.
By all accounts, the sprit of Thanksgiving, 2020-style, transcended COVID-19 fears and restrictions. Every issue of The Recorder in recent days has covered news about food bank drives, meal pick-up drive-thrus, fundraisers and reimaginings of traditions in new guises. Countless small-scale efforts ranged from slices of homemade pie dropped off at senior housing centers to families who packed up and delivered complete Thanksgiving meals from their own tables to nearby friends.
Local celebrities from “Bobby C” to “Monte” Belmonte inspired people to donate at record-breaking levels. “The total is beyond my wildest expectations for this year’s march,” Belmonte said. His 11th annual Monte’s March raised a record-shattering $614,000, well over the $365,000 goal. “But I think our neighbors know that this year, in particular, the need is immense. And they have met that need with immense generosity.”
Even schoolchildren from across Franklin County got into the spirit with mini walks that raised money, food donations and awareness of hunger in the very young. “Participating shows that we care, and that we’re acknowledging people get hungry,” Conway fifth-grader Lucy Zraunig, 11, said. In Colrain, students participated in the school’s first mini march as part of a larger, schoolwide service learning initiative about food insecurity in the region. “My hope,” Colrain Central School Principal Amy Looman said, “is that (children) come away seeing themselves as people who can make a difference. They don’t have to wait until they’re grownups to do that.”
If this pandemic proves anything, it’s that our highest impulses will prevail over our steepest obstacles.