Board Reflections: Where Hope Meets Bounty

Everything is greening up in my yard. It’s like a chorus singing together in harmony. My volunteer oregano and thyme are really singing loudly. This is such an interesting time of year because there’s so much life emerging, and yet nothing to harvest – nothing really to provide sustenance. It reminds me of being a child, helping my grandmother in the late summer to set about canning peaches, cherries, green beans, pickles. The jars of the harvest would line the wood planked basement shelves like a rainbow. This time of year we would be sent down to the scary cellar to fetch a jar of something in particular, only to notice that there may be only one or two jars left; and the summer harvest was a long time off. There was often a discussion about how to stretch the dwindling bounty to meet up with this year’s crop. Store bought was out of the question.

Spring is this curious in-between time of hope and renewal, and yet how do we bridge the diminishing stores of winter with the harvest of summer? So it seems when we start something anew – there’s an interlude of scarcity in the present with hope of something better that we can see happening in small but visible ways. Keep looking.

Submitted by Darcy Pollock