The weekend of Earth Day signals the time of the year when folks in our community come out of hibernation. We poke our heads out the doors of our moss-covered houses, notice that the winter’s monsoon rains are subsiding and that the sun is kind of, somewhat, occasionally visible in the sky. Taking a cue from the frogs we hear at night who are massing and singing their little green heads off in our area's ponds and wetlands, we humans come together in choruses and we too feel a primal need to communicate with our kind.
We’ve had six months of social deprivation. This is the season when we gather and we talk-talk-talk.
A friend and I spent our day Saturday talking-up the benefits of bicycling at the community’s spring “Ecofest,” a celebration of all-things-green. We handed out maps of bike routes and gave folks tips on how to get that old Schwinn that’s been stored in the garage back into riding condition. Our county’s transit division supplied us with safety blinky-lights, which my friend and I handed out to kids, who are, after all, the future of our planet.
“Ecofest” was only "spring training" for our summer season of coming-together as a community. Farmers’ Market begins this weekend, and we human members of the frog-wannabe-chorus will gather each Saturday now through fall.
It feels good to be out and about.
