Frances Stebbins, Correspondent
[This is a memory from the many decades the author has been privileged to write for daily and weekly newspapers circulating in Western Virginia.]
The calendar says it’s Spring, the beginning of a welcome season to many people. In these mountain-valleys though, we know snow can flurry as late as early May.
I don’t remember “flurries” in my childhood home east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The fine flakes that blow about on cold, windy days appear to occur only in hill country. What falls doesn’t stick.
Over at Salem’s Roman Catholic Church, Our Lady of Perpetual Help at 314 Turner Road, members of the fraternal order Knights of Columbus are selling their flounder fish dinners on Friday evenings in Lent. By calling 540-387-0491, you can order a meal – enough for two nights for me – of breaded or broiled fish, a baked potato with trimmings, a cup of coleslaw, hush puppies, a roll and a choice of desserts made by members of the parish. Each meal costs $10 and may be eaten indoors at the church parish hall this year or boxed for takeout.
A Lenten tradition, the fish dinners also will be sold at other nearby Catholic churches to help support the order’s charitable works.
The strong possibility that Daylight Savings Time (DST) may become a year-round permanent thing fills me with mixed feelings. I’m still conditioned by my memories of World War II when, as a high school student in a small Virginia town surrounded by meadows and woods we lived with it for the several years hostilities lasted.
It was detested by most people I knew whose livings depended on nature and the yearly cycles of the sun. Cows did not come in at the usual time to be milked nor my mother’s poultry flock to be fed for the night. During the dark winter months, children who rode from the country on buses had to get up in the dark, and the weak winter sun was of little value for outside work.
In an effort to make the scheduling a little better, school administrators set the hours of attendance at 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. If for no other reason, most people were happy when there was no more DST after Japan surrendered in the summer of 1945. That was the same year the world began to live with the hidden terror of the atomic – later hydrogen – bomb that could wipe cities off the map.
Maybe it’s different now as more people live away from the land where the longer evenings are welcome for indoor employees. Lately, it’s seemed to me, having DST from March through September offers more benefit.
As the flowers of the season brighten our yards, I’m reminded of the far-off days – those in “the War” referred to with DST – when our high school literature books introduced us teens to English Poetry. I loved it, especially that produced by the “Romantic” writers of the 18th and 19th Centuries. The term “romantic” refers here, not to the experience of emotional-physical attraction but rather deep awareness of the beauty of God’s creation.
Of such, did the English poet William Wordsworth write in his description of “a host of golden daffodils.” Bright and fragrant, they are with us only a short time, but, as Wordsworth wrote in “I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud,” in retrospect they make “the heart dance.”
Remember last fall when we had a heavy crop of acorns, the first produced by my young Chestnut Oak in my front yard? Folklore has it that a lot of nuts is God’s way of providing food for a hard winter. Where were the deep freezes and a couple of feet of the snow? They weren’t unless we can count that only moderately deep snow /sleet mix that stayed around for days.