A side effect of the world being upside down for a year is the unexpected beauty and wit that the universe continues to throw at us. My oldest son, 10, has blossomed into an avid collector of ski trail maps, the origami squares you kept jammed in your parka to look at on the lift before smartphones changed our world. Occasionally, I look up a resort and see if it is easy to contact customer service or the ticket window. Most times, corporate America thwarts my efforts. (Calling Vail and hoping for a quick answer instead of getting trapped in an endless labyrinth of “press 1” options is a little like standing in front of the White House thinking Joe is going to come out and say hello just to you.) At one area in Colorado, however, I found an easy fill form and asked for a map.

One sends these types of messages with the thought that one will be able to tell spouse, child, parents, in-laws, and friends that AT LEAST one has tried, but that one must never expect a response from such an anonymous platform, most likely dominated by “bots.”

When the return message came into my email from “Snow Reporter,” I expected one of two responses: a canned “no” or something approaching a begrudging “yes.” The universe had other plans.

Norwichians, it is worth reminding ourselves that Colorado has a certain reputation that jibes pretty well with our own. Beautiful scenery. Population enthused by outdoor activities. A certain permissiveness about THC and craft beer. People who have left elsewhere searching for happiness who end up staying.

“I’ll get a map in the mail to you first thing Monday morning!,” the message read. “We hope to see you!”

Two exclamation points were enough to convince me I had done good. But what floored me was that the kind person at the other end of the interwebs had a name – avian in theme – that is revered in the 05055. Nay, not Partridge – can you imagine? Neither was it Hawk, Falcon, or Eagle.

“Ms. Sparrow,” I wrote back, “In our family, we talk about the concept of a ‘universe wink.’ It’s when you dare to ask for something or try something new or take a little bit of a risk (no matter how small or inconsequential) and the universe just kind of winks back at you, letting you know that you are doing alright. Well, the universe wink in this story is that a very popular café in our  little Vermont town is the Blue SPARROW Kitchen. Amazing. Thank you so much; our son will be thrilled.”

She wrote back, “I love that! Thanks for sharing the universe wink!” It’s a silly thing, but in these times, it seems to me that if we can no longer thrill at the silly things, then history will write that the virus won.

 It turns out that ski maps weren’t the only sextant for my soul, pointing the way towards a memory. Recently, after completing a task that can only be described as “essential” in New Hampshire, I took my normal route down the hill towards my hometown. At an intersection, on the best sign in Hanover (VERMONT ->), there was something new.

 Of all the 50 states, how many feature residents who would premeditate the need for spray paint, cross state lines out of their own state against the governor’s pandemic orders, locate a highway sign indicating the direction of their own home state, withdraw the aforementioned paint, and draw a couple of hearts to indicate to the wayward traveller who had forsaken their homeland that not all was lost, that their people were but a short distance across a green bridge and a black river?

My answer?

One.

These last 12 months, it has been hard to find the music in the world, like we all have a little water in our ears that no amount of jumping up and down can drain. The chaos comes at us like snowflakes in a blizzard, toying with our equilibrium. Anxiety and distress lurk behind every curtain and around every corner. And yet, somehow, strangers take a chance that maybe, just maybe, a little vandalism-turned-poetry will make others smile. They help pop the bubble and return your audio to normal. The person or people who painted those two hearts on the Vermont sign make my world sing… and our universe wink.

This spring issue of the Norwich Times happens to coincide with the time of greatest change in the Upper Valley.  We go from cold nights and snow covered ground in early March, to the warm (sometimes hot) days, spring rains, and long hours of light of late May.  In between there are ice events, spring flooding, mud, and the long awaited greening of trees and lawns…oh, and the flowers – who can forget the flowers.

Is there a greater boost to morale after many months of icy roads, snow covered driveways, and dirty snow piles than the seeing the colorful spring blooms of the hyacinths, crocuses and daffodils?  The pleasure realized when those first shoots from bulbs planted the previous year, appear on a warm spring day?  For many of our friends, neighbors, and ourselves, those long awaited events touch and rejuvenate the soul.

Whether we tend our own gardens, hire professionals for the work, or admire neighbors’ gardens, Norwich folks seem to have a particular affinity for gardens and gardening.  Norwich homeowner Heather Benson exemplifies the manner in which gardening becomes more than a mere landscaping project.   “Many years ago, we created several perennial gardens in an effort to spruce up the landscaping around our home,” she says.   “In that effort, I discovered that the color and beauty did more than help our lack of landscaping – it lifted my spirits and created enjoyment.”

A love of growing, gardening often results from those first efforts.  A kind of spiritual awakening, if you will.  Even for those whose livelihoods involve tilling the soil, that spiritual experience of gardening does not disappear.

Norwich gardener Norah Lake not only operates a commercial farm (Sweetland Farm), she tends her own gardens for personal enjoyment.  “It’s funny to take off my farmer hat and put on my gardener hat for a few minutes,” she says.  “But gardening and farming have always held different places in my heart. Even while growing rows and acres of production vegetables I still see a place in my life for gardening as well.”

Norah goes on to explain how personal gardening is not only relaxing for her, but also proves inspiring.  “The pace and scale of gardening are important factors in my enjoyment of it. When working in my garden I give myself space and time to observe, enjoy, and just be. I am outdoors experiencing the beauty of nature in all its facets. I am feeling the warmth of the sun or the crumble of the soil or the texture of the foliage.  I am immersing myself in the color of an unfurling poppy or a butterfly’s wing or the pruning shears against the backdrop of a harvest basket.”

Gardening is work – no doubt about it.  Turning the soil, forming the beds, mulching, weeding, planting, fall cleanup – all require a physical investment.  Yet the pains involved, for most, are far surpassed by the joys realized.

For those unable to handle the physical work involved, there are gardening professionals around to help.  Mary Ellen Treadway tends gardens around the Upper Valley professionally, primarily perennial flower gardens.  Does tending the gardens of others lessen the enjoyment received from gardening?  “No, tending others’ gardens is satisfying, as those gardens become a part of you,” she says.

Especially today, concerns about health, both physical and emotional, are uppermost in our minds.  Valerie Woodhouse, of Norwich’s Honey Field Farm, explains how gardening benefits health.  “The garden is a place of nurturing and growth for both the plants and their caretakers.  There’s so many ways that the garden decreases stress, combats depression, gives us a sense of purpose and hope.  It invites us to get swept up in the act of planting seeds or pulling weeds, and be fully present for a moment or two.  Simply digging your hands into the soil releases serotonin which relieves stress and lifts your spirit.”

Valerie also describes the cooperative nature of gardening – the gardener, and nature.  “The garden seems to reflect what we need most.  For me, that’s the constant reminder to take a minute to pause, step back, and appreciate the transformation I’m a part of whether it went as planned or not.  It’s enjoying the beauty, smells and tastes even more because we created and overcame it together.”

Those benefits, physical, emotional, spiritual, are summed up by Heather Benson.  “I love being outside…weeding, planting, harvesting, and tending of the garden is another way for me to be in the fresh air and sunshine. Gardening nurtures my body and soul on so many levels and it somehow feels like much more than just a pastime.”

While the digital revolution, well, evolved, Norwich resident Nora Jacobson still preferred to show her movies to – and to attend other filmmakers’ works with – a bunch of other people in a theater.

Shoulder to shoulder.

Knee to knee.

Face to face.

“People don’t watch as carefully, I think, if they’re watching on a device, by themselves, especially at home,” Jacobson says. “They’re distracted by the phone or texts. You don’t get that same sense of people zeroing in on your film, especially if you make films that are complex, like I do.”

Jacobson’s complicated fictional tales range from 1998’s My Mother’s Early Lovers and 2004’s Nothing Like Dreaming to 2016’s The Hanji Box (look up these titles on www.imdb.com), the latter of which she screened at the White River Indie Film Festival in 2017.

Jacobson also planned to show an early version of her work-in-progress documentary about poet Ruth Stone to a live audience during the 2020 festival in White River last spring, the better to elicit feedback.

Then the coronavirus pandemic forced White River Indie Film to cancel its 16th annual festival, most of which would have screened at the Briggs Opera House.

It didn’t end there, however. The WRIF board brainstormed ways to stay on the radar of the Upper Valley’s devotees of film, resolving to use virtual technology to share and encourage discussion about as many movies as possible.

“We were all ready to do programs for the May festival when the quarantines started, but we didn’t want to leave it there,” Plainfield filmmaker, Upper Valley native and WRIF board president Samantha Davidson Green recalls. “The board made a commitment to do everything in our power to connect people to film.”

That effort began with WRIF joining the Sierra Club of the Upper Valley to live-stream a program celebrating the 50th anniversary of Earth Day in April.

And in May, some 50 people signed up for the discussion of Jacobson’s Stone documentary – far more than she expects would have come to the theater in person.

“It was incredibly helpful for me,” Jacobson said of the discussion of her work in progress, now in the editing stages. “I received a lot of good feedback from people. I could ask questions of the audience and they could answer.”

WRIF also helped Jacobson, a co-founder and former board president of the group, continue the part of her Freedom & Unity project closest to her heart: Encouraging young filmmakers around Vermont to pursue passion projects of their own, with an emphasis on social justice.

While fewer Vermonters submitted films than in years past,  among the 56 who did was Norwich’s  young Ezra McGinley-Smith, whose documentary short about the Willing Hands program fighting food insecurity won the middle-school division’s social justice award.

“It was hard getting as many to submit this year because so many young people, especially, had been thrown into isolation,” Jacobson said. “The silver lining was that during the awards ceremony, which we did on Zoom, many more kids were able to participate in the discussion after the screenings. In the past, we would have to get them to come to the theater. This way, we had a much higher attendance from the young people. The kids tend to be rather shy when they’re standing on the stage. But in the safety of their homes, they were more open.”

Among the films those audiences got to discuss was Norwich teenager

Ezra McGinley-Smith’s documentary short called Willing Hands – a 7½-minute documentary about how the Norwich-based nonprofit, which collects surplus and donated food that otherwise would go to waste, focused on getting that food to Upper Valley residents who lost jobs and income during the COVID crisis. The film in 2020 won the middle-school division’s social-justice award from Jacobson’s Freedom & Unity program, which grew out of the series of movies about Vermont.

“When it won,” he told the Norwich Times last fall, “I was like, ‘Wow: there’s potential for this!’”

McGinley-Smith, a polymath of a creative, said at the time that he didn’t think too much about filmmaking until he attended the WRIF festival a few years ago.

“I can’t remember exactly when, but I was still at Marion Cross School,” said McGinley-Smith, now an eighth-grader at Richmond Middle School in Hanover. “I got really inspired by what I saw.”

Not long after arriving at Dartmouth College to teach film in 2010, Jodie Mack also found inspiration in WRIF’s promotion of local moviemaking, and in Jacobson’s commitment to that goal.

“In 2016, my ‘Curating and Microcinema’ course at Dartmouth created a program for WRIF – ‘Dames and Gutters’ – short animated films showcasing the representation of female comic characters (that featured) contemporary and historical works… (and) celebrated the shared trajectories of comics and animation alongside various female tropes promoted throughout the years” at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River. 

And in 2019, Mack screened her first feature film at WRIF at Northern Stage in White River Junction.

“It was one of the first times I’d ever shared my work locally outside of Dartmouth,” she says. “The experience of sharing my films with my neighbors was a tremendous inspiration.”

Inspiration enough to join Davidson, CATV’s Chico Eastridge, Tunbridge musician and multimedia artist Quinn Thomashow and other Upper Valley creative in putting together a Light River Junction festival of experimental film screenings at outdoor venues around downtown White River in December.

“I was so thrilled at the turnout and for the love and care behind the event, both from the organizers and the attendees,” Mack says. “With WRIF, we have a gem – an opportunity for people to come together in the name of cinema, to seek pleasure and challenge from the screen as a community.”

The Light River Junction festival culminated a 2020 that could have been an artistic desert.

Instead, after its spring and summer programs, WRIF hosted a fall series of virtual discussions leading up to the November election, with an emphasis on race and voter suppression, also exceeded the organizers’ expectations. With panelists ranging from Vermont congressman Peter Welch to Kiah Morris, the Black state representative from Bennington County who left the Vermont legislature after months of harassment, “we ended up with fabulous participation because we didn’t have any geographical bounds,” Davidson Green says. “We really felt it was an urgent time, to offer opportunities to connect.”

The warm, relatively dry summer of 2020 gave a variety of area arts groups a brief opportunity to reconnect us with live performance – some enlightening, some entertaining, many serving both purposes.

At Lyman Point Park in White River, the Hartford recreation department staged several concerts by Americana musicians.

In Woodstock, Pentangle Arts executive director Alita Paine Wilson recruited Vermont-based performers, including Hartland singer-songwriter Jay Nash and Pomfret native Tristan Henderson’s band Pete’s Posse, for a short-but-sweet series of Music by the River concerts behind the North Universalist Chapel.

Meanwhile, Barnard’s BarnArts Center for the Arts recruited area actors to perform a theatrical adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s Vermont-based dystopian novel, It Can’t Happen Here, during a late-summer, well, barnstorming tour of town greens and parks around central Vermont. My wife Goodie and I saw the production, a timely as well as entertaining reminder of the approaching election, at Woodstock’s East End Park, along with at least 100 socially-distanced spectators in the hillside bleachers – a blessed break in the drought of live performance.

Before long, of course, came the shortening and the chilling of the days, and the yet another darkening of the performing-arts world as we knew it. Sure, it helps to fill some of the void, if one has broadband, to gain access to live-streaming of programs and movies from sources ranging from White River’s JAG Productions and Dartmouth College’s Hopkins Center, to the Billings Farm and Museum’s Woodstock Vermont Film and the Chandler Center for the Arts in Randolph.

As for 2021? Hold the phone.

“We don’t anticipate an old-fashioned festival until 2022,” Davidson Green said. “We’re looking right now at doing a hybrid of outdoors and streaming this spring, along the lines of the Light River Junction concept.

“The goal, long-term, is to continue nurturing the full cycle, with the activist angle that has been a big part of our identity.

“There’s a lot of good will right now.”

Long before white settlers came to live in the Upper Valley in the mid-1700s, the Native American Chief Mascommah hunted and fished all along the Connecticut River Valley eventually settling in Northfield, Massachusetts. The name ‘Mascoma’ appears in many places throughout the Upper Valley, so it must have been a logical choice for the founders when Mascoma Bank was established 122 years ago in 1899 as a mutually-owned bank.

How has this Upper Valley institution maintained its community and local-first banking principals amidst so many technology, economic, and social changes over more than 100 years? According to current President and CEO (and former Norwich resident) Clay Adams, Mascoma Bank was intentionally designed to be locally owned and to support community philanthropy, and the bank has simply stayed true to its original mission. It is this community-first philosophy, along with solid strategic planning, that has helped Mascoma Bank weather many financial storms that have forced other banks to close or merge.

Adapting to new technologies has also helped the bank grow and change with the times. Clay notes, “One thing I’ve said consistently since I’ve arrived is that technology investments are absolutely critical,” says Clay. “We need to serve our customers’ needs where, when, and how they want to bank.” New financial products and tools constantly emerge under the banner of ‘fintechs,’ (financial technology companies) like mobile banking applications and simplified online banking services. “Community banks have not made the investments in technology that we should have, and traditional providers serving banks are not innovating as fast as the rest of the market.”

Clay became President and CEO of Mascoma Bank in January 2017, succeeding long-time President Steve Christy. After serving on the bank’s Board of Directors for five years and holding CEO roles at regional businesses like Simon Pearce and Resource Systems Group, Clay was ready to step into a new leadership challenge. “Growing up, I held a lot of leadership positions through high school and college. I naturally gravitated toward that aspect.”

Clay contributed to a number of organizations early in his career, and realized he was missing the top-level leadership experience. As his experiences evolved, Clay stitched together a ‘quilt of leadership models’ to inform his approach. “I’ve picked up different ideas about leadership by reading a lot of history and serving on boards with other leaders. All leaders have things they’re good at and not so good at.” Among the many skills required to be a successful CEO, Clay brought visioning, strategic partnering, and working with nonprofits, government, and business sectors to the Mascoma Bank Community. “I had great familiarity with the institution and the regions we serve, and we have a great group of employees I can rely on for the day-to-day operations.”

In keeping with its local-first philosophy, Clay helped the bank continue its journey toward becoming a Certified B Corporation, which is a legal commitment to consider the impact of decisions on employees, customers, the community, and the environment. Companies balance the ‘triple bottom line,” giving people, places, and the planet equal priority. “The Board had been discussing B Corp Certification for a couple of years, and we pushed it over the goal line. We felt we’d already been acting as a B Corporation since the bank was started by a group of citizens from Lebanon that pooled their money and didn’t expect a return. We grow our capital and give back to our communities. The B Corp mantra is ‘best for the world’ so making it official is a nice way to validate what we’ve been doing for 122 years.”

Indeed, significant funds have been contributed to Upper Valley organizations: $2 million in 2020, and more than $8 million over the past five years. In Norwich, Willing Hands, Upper Valley Trails Alliance, Norwich Library, The Family Place, and Montshire Museum have all received funding averaging $5,000 each for programs, equipment, capital campaigns, and events to support their operations and services.

“Keeping money local contributes to a virtuous cycle of job creation, philanthropy, community involvement, and local business ownership. Amazon is not going away and there are great benefits to that business, but it is also nice to have local institutions that are unique to and familiar with the Upper Valley.” The pandemic has inspired additional contributions by the Mascoma Bank Foundation to support childcare, racial equity, affordable housing, and nonprofit organizations that rely on visitors. “Philanthropy drives a lot of the behaviors at the bank, not just in terms of the money we want to give away, but in how we conduct all of our business; it’s a lot easier to work harder and longer when you’re doing it for a higher purpose.”

With 28 branches stretching across northern New England, Mascoma Bank’s community betterment impact is significant. It also reaches far beyond the Upper Valley because of a unique award from the US Treasury in 2020. In recent years, the $170 million New Markets Tax Credits (NMTC) allocation from the US Treasury has allowed the bank to help stimulate business development in underserved urban and rural neighborhoods. The bank has awarded NMTC Funds to develop the Nashua Performing Arts Center, a hotel in Burlington, a steel fabrication operation in Berlin, NH, and several other projects which are still operating despite the pandemic.

For Clay Adams and the more than 370 Mascoma Bank employees, community service is both a personal and professional ethic. Currently, Clay serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the Montshire Museum of Science, Alice Peck Day Hospital, Ford Sayre Memorial Ski Council, and Vital Communities Corporate Council. Each year, Mascoma Bank employees provide hands-on help from building projects to mentoring students and helping seniors through the Bank’s paid Volunteer Time Off program.

For 122 years, it’s been a win-win situation for both the bank and the communities that it serves, says Clay. “As the bank grows and is more profitable, we return more money to the community. This is one of the most meaningful parts of being with a bank dedicated to making a difference.”