Groundhog Day dawned with a cloud cover that hovered overhead like a suspended gray comforter. It lingered the entire day so there was never a shadow cast by a groundhog or anything else. Accordingly, rather than an early spring, we can expect six more weeks of winter, which puts us about mid-March. Sounds spot on.
For those who have had enough of winter, Feb 2nd is a consolation. Groundhog Day marks the midpoint between the shortest day of the year and the spring solstice. The days are getting longer, the northern hemisphere is warming and there are changes afoot. Great horned owls are incubating eggs, cardinals are singing at daybreak with a growing enthusiasm, roots of maple are primed to pump sweet sap to its outermost limbs. On the frozen marsh stands a lone wood duck, a drake, eyeing a nest box mounted on a pole nearby. He knows.
Our days might be gray and drab but an orchestra is tuning up for a grand annual performance with a repertoire refined over millions of years. Every component plays a critical role and is blended in perfect harmony. Anything absent or off key rattles the entire ensemble.
As we await the opening curtain we are lambasted with news that rattles our world: our well established institutions, our privacy and personal information, our national security, has all been compromised. Our constitution and democracy and form of government is being upended. It’s big news, and some of the damage already done cannot be undone.
We were in Indy today and pulled into a fast food joint for lunch. It was a chain restaurant, one of those we detest for serving food-like products discovered in food science laboratories and brought to market via destructive agricultural practices, but their jalapeno burger is to die for. The young man at the drive up window wore a huge smile and looked me square in the eye, thanked me and called me “brother.” Maybe I caught him at just the right moment and circumstances beyond his employment were responsible for his bubbly happiness, but I think not. And it just so happened I was at the window with a head full of national news and was bathing in discontent when this kid’s exuberance caught me off guard. I pulled away but was ready to take a lap and order more poison food just so I could talk to the guy again.
I thought about him on the way home while listening to a podcast about another young man, a 31-year-old rancher in the Texas panhandle. He’d lost his herd of more than 700 cattle in the Smokehouse Creek fire late last year. He’d adopted the latest regenerative ag practices and was making great strides in converting 4000 overgrazed, long abused acres into productive native grass pastureland. He was doing everything right. The fire had taken away almost everything he had and left him with the overwhelming tasks of rebuilding miles of fencing, cleaning up hundreds of charred carcasses, and navigating a nightmare of insurance logistics. He took it on while still taking time to support his local community and lending a hand to neighbors, some who were worse off than him. His spirit remained intact, his determination unscathed.
These two guys live in different worlds. There’s no comparing the challenges of running a ranch to manning a drive-up window, but I see in both an enthusiasm and optimism for life which cynicism has taken from my own. In their separate ways they demonstrate a resolve to find something good in every day and pass it on, and their actions are contagious.
So this grumpy old man is feeling a bit inspired. There are people, a majority, many of them young with heads squarely attached, holding onto a belief that a happy and prosperous life is still possible in the greatest democracy on earth; that freedom is not yet lost and justice can still prevail; that we can do what it takes to keep the orchestra of spring finely tuned and blowing our socks off with its annual performance.
It can all be true if we insist.
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