The double-edge of March

 

March has brought us flowers and pain, new life and old woes across the world. 

 I just put up my monthly sign for PORCH, our local volunteer hunger relief organization (I've written about it before), and sent a note to neighbors to remind them of our bag of food/donation collection next weekend.  

Hunger, like March, is a many-sided brute.  While aesthetics consider it a path to holiness; others a staff of life for themselves and families; and some a dietery  regimen, or the latest diet, there are those for whom, through lack of basic resources or famine or the destruction of war, hunger means more than food...homes destroyed or abandoned, families separated, children unfed in so many ways, the loneliness of an unreachable distance...with miles to go to safety, if there is means and strength and time. 

I am glad to work for PORCH...they are a wonderful, dedicated, and determined grassroots group of volunteer women and men, young and elder.  The relief of hunger, even here in this privileged town, is important; the food-challenged (I'm wary of this euphemism, though it's used a lot) can be invisible but present in multitudes.  Mostly we worry about children and the strapped families who care for them...grandmothers, immigrants, refugees, single parents, teenagers...the  stranger at the gate.

But as I wrote this morning's PORCH reminder, I thought of all those far from reach or help.  It seems an impossible task, that saving of life through its most elemental need...food.  In spring, the season of flowering, the earth bringing forth its beauty, promising abundance in gardens and farms, we yearn for...even expect...hope.   The connotations of March delude us.

Our book group this month read a novel from a newish writer who needs reminding that it's best to write what you know and can feel.  It centered on librarians in Paris who struggle to keep safe their books and themselves from the coming invasion of Hitler's ruinous corps, and while it looked promising, it read quite superficially...I'd call it a romance novel.

The book seemed a surprising choice for a group like ours...indeed, we couldn't figure out who recommended it.  We like history, and certainly we grew up in libraries and books, but we usually ask of writers some sensibility, some insight, into the human spirit.  It is well, if you are out to please a quick reader, to paint a backdrop of historical anecdotes (usually ones that can be gotten from the encyclopaedia), the most poignant to swell the heart and the most horrifying to thrill...and then draw in the foreground a romantic intrigue or two.  

rvm, "Wish you were here"

Our discussion, though, broke through into the subject of betrayal...the betrayal of one people to another, of one person to another, of the horror of both betrayal and reprisal.  Who can you trust if the climate of hunger is thrust upon you?  What would you do, even against the common good (or the family good, if it comes to that) to survive, physically and emotionally?  How do you live with the consequences, life-long?  This last, it seemed to me, presents an intriguing look into the varieties of ways in which denial and doubt tangle the spirit, foiling hope.

If we thought the inconvenience of the Covid pandemic was problematic (betrayal, denial and doubt rife there, too), think of the constancy of war betraying the hunger most of us have for a life of substance beyond survival...a life not pitted against the power hungry, the egoists, the tunnel-visioned Goliaths.

Alice Dodds May, "Invasion"

It's hardly up to March, its namesake the god of war, to find a way through the conundrum of beauty and horror...the season is meant only to illustrate it.  For us, who must take it to task, person and people, where is the inspiration, where the means...where the hope?

Joy after Hope, photo from Susan Stein

Perhaps, to begin, we need to accept hope as it comes, 

one spring-scented breeze at a time.