Each Thursday evening I eagerly go online to read The Wind, the simple newsletter from Vinalhaven, the island 15 miles off the coast of Maine that we visit each summer. Twelve hundred hearty souls live there year round, making it Maine’s largest permanent off shore community. While there are many reasons I so anticipate settling down with The Wind and reading it cover to cover, I have noticed an interesting phenomenon on its pages as the cacophony and discord of the election enveloped the nation.
Usually, The Wind’s front page contains announcements of various community events, news of islanders convalescing from an illness or an accident, and a couple letters of thanks to the whole community. Starting sometime this fall, the letters of thanks started to increase – and increase some more. They all go something like this:
“We want to thank everyone for all the food people brought when Barbara slipped and hurt her leg. We live in the best place on earth, and we’re very grateful.”
These thank you notices, which are all paid advertisements, used to be printed to thank people for their expressions of condolence following a death, for the lengths someone would go to in order to evacuate a seriously ill person from the island in the middle of the night during a horrendous storm, or for some generous response to some other fairly extreme event. However, amidst the mean rhetoric of the campaign, I noticed people expressing their gratitude for “smaller” acts of kindness – someone stopping to help out when a truck got stuck on a muddy road shoulder; the fire company responding to a chimney fire; a group helping to find a lost dog; a neighbor who used his chainsaw to unblock an elderly friend’s driveway; the local organic farmer sharing a root vegetable harvest with anyone who wanted or needed something.
In a country that seems angry and unsettled, it is as if the Vinalhaven community recognized that in reaching out to others, in expressing gratitude for kindness, and in doing more for those who surround them, they could exert a profoundly powerful and palliative influence on their piece of the world. I don’t know if the proliferation of such front page notices led to an even more kind acts or if islanders are simply more mindful about expressing their gratitude for the precious kindness that surrounds them. But I can’t help thinking how wonderful it would be if the “sophisticated” newspapers – and social media sites – of the world followed The Wind’s lead and made expressions of gratitude the front page news they deserve to be. At the very least, these messages serve as a model of the kind of gratitude we want to instill within our children, far beyond the month of Thanksgiving and our consideration of this month’s Primary Day value.