Lions and Lambs
March 5, 2021
In like a lion, out like a lamb. I remember my second-grade teacher, Ms. Thomason, telling us this old saying about the month of March. In the mid-west, that rang pretty true. Frosts and freezes and even the errant epic snow storm were regular companions for the month, but by April, you could pretty much count on the jonquils rising from the newly sunlight softened earth. Up here near 45 North, March may not play on quite the same way with the spring flora, but I can tell you I’m on the lookout every time this week I drive by my neighbor Pat’s sugar house, waiting to see the telltale smoke that’s better than a thermometer for telling me winter’s on the wane. March is the snowiest month in Vermont, they tell us and maybe that cross between big snows and sugar house smoke is our lion and lamb. Whatever March has in store for us, April is inevitable.
This is the metaphor: it’s been hard on all of us, really hard. But change is inevitable. And as we’ve seen these last two weeks with students in the building and last night—when half the faculty were able to sign up for their first vaccine doses in Barre on Sunday—change right now is for the good. This is earth-softening-jonquil-pushing-through change. Sugar house smoke rising change. Not just hope or wishful thinking, but the hard fact of improvement on its way, of things getting better now, like a rush of snowmelt water descending from App Gap through Baldwin Creek, waking the brook trout up, waking the world up.
I wish you could have heard the laughter erupting from the 9th grade first period Tuesday morning in room 206, the romp between 8th grade factions at break and lunch, Kris vaccuming up this afternoon after the joyful mess that is hands-on science in 6th grade, the school building coming back to life, a burgeoning stem pushing through the soil into the light.
Happiest of weekends to you all!
Dr. Dexter P. Mahaffey, Head of School