April 19, 2024

Next year, on this day, Concord will celebrate the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the battle at the Old North Bridge.  I imagine it must have been a day like this one, an early spring day, a day that I “went to the woods”, following advice from Henry David Thoreau.

By a small creek, freshened by spring rain, I found these: fiddleheads, small as a baby’s fist, pushing their tender bodies up through mud and leaf litter; skunk cabbages, unfurling in the slough and ripple of the rill: green shoots slim as sharpened pencils and yellow knots of leaves-to-come hanging from birch branches.

A traveler, intent on their path to a distant destination, foot following foot, would pass by here, its small miracles of early spring unnoticed. A wanderer, instead, unhurried, will bend down to gaze upon earth’s uncorked energy spouting towards the light.

Dylan Thomas, erratic, ingenious Welsh poet wrote: “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green age.”

Do you feel it? Feel that force, the pull? Feel winter’s cold grip loosening in your body, softening your spirit, summoning you to uncurl and stretch your body skyward, your face uplifted to the rain?

Perhaps it’s no accident that April 19, with its fierce force of spring, was the day that women and men of Concord began to throw off the heavy cloak of England. How I wish that the fire in their bellies had led them not to violence but to seek freedom by other means.  They were, however, as we are, imperfect people.  Oppressed by the British, they in turn were oppressors; keeping slaves and stealing indigenous land.

What if we could distill a pure, unsullied liqueur from the blood of that battle and use it to feed seeds of promise; promise that from the smallest fern to the widest prairie and the deepest ocean, our planet will survive. The time is now. Spring is calling.