The Healing Land — Community Inter-Dependence Day

by Shawn and Beth Dougherty, Plain Values

July Fourth is an important day in our village. We always say Hinton has the best fireworks display in the valley, and people come from all over to watch. The park is full of strangers as well as neighbors, and the lines in front of the two village ice cream stands are backed up for miles. It’s a big event.

Weaving through the crowds until we find a place among our friends on the already-crowded park benches, we can finally slow down and take a deep breath. What with all the holiday preparations, as well as the ordinary farm chores, it has been a busy day. And since community picnics wouldn’t be complete without our molasses ginger cake, we really had to prepare ahead.

Sour cream must be started days before you are going to need it. In July heat, milk clabbers overnight, but cream takes longer to reach the perfect thickness for baking and to develop its rich, tart flavor. We started ours last week to make sure of being ready. Churning butter in warm weather is a different kind of challenge since warm cream makes slick, soft butter, unsuitable for cake-making. So, we get up early in the morning on churning days to take advantage of the cool temperatures that settle into our hollow overnight. It all works.

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THE BARNYARD

Halfway through mixing up the ginger cake, we find that the egg basket is empty. That means a trip down the hill to the hen house to gather eggs. Beowulf, our farm dog and self-appointed escort and guardian, trots ahead of us along the narrow creekside trail, protecting us, we suppose, from any fierce, man-eating frogs and chipmunks that might be around. No one needs to teach Beowulf what community means; he’s just naturally involved in whatever is going on.

Really, all the farm animals are like that. Passing through the barn, we stop to admire a litter of kittens nesting in the manger where last winter the sheep were fed. The grey tabby curls purring around four tiny blobs of pink, white, and grey, her eyes yellow slits of contentment. Our young heifer, Pansy, snuffs them loudly, her eyes wide and alarmed, but Delphinium, the old black Jersey, is all benevolence, interested in a grandmotherly sort of way.

Under the manger, a cochin banty hen is sitting on thirteen brown eggs—not her own, but from our Rhode Island Red flock. Banties are better mothers than most chickens, so we let them do all the hatching on the farm. It’s amusing to see a banty hen surrounded by half-grown chicks bigger than she is, but still identifying her as ‘mother.’ Even chick-raising is really a community effort.

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THE FARM

The cake in the oven at last, we set to work finishing chores before we head for the village to join the celebration. Sheep and heifers are moved forward on their hillside pasture; chickens are fed their afternoon scratch, and eggs are collected. The three pigs in the barn are slopped early, with an extra bucket of whey to celebrate the holiday. The four dairy cows are milked and taken back to pasture, mamas plodding sedately, their calves racing in mad circles around them.

A lemon-cream-and-powdered-sugar glaze puts the finishing touch on our picnic offering. The flowered platter it rests on was great-grandmother Mary’s, and it’s not without some trepidation that we see it go out the door; but Grandma would have wanted to be a part of our festival, so we just say a prayer that it will make it home, and let it go.

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THE PARK

The streets are full of cars, bicycles, and folks on foot all headed down to the riverside to get as close as possible to the high school stadium where the fireworks will be set off. The village fire trucks shoulder their way through the throng still draped in the banners they wore for this morning’s parade, their diesel engines grumbling and muttering. Now they’re all about business, stationing themselves strategically in case of fire. Better to be safe than sorry.

Andrew, our fire chief, looks the very image of relaxation as he tosses a softball with his four-year-old. Big, strong, slow, he’d remind you of a sleepy bear—until something goes wrong. Seeing him helping his wife Bethany in their garden, you’d never guess how fast he can move in an emergency.

Tim and Caroline join us carrying matching green folding chairs with John Deere logos. Tim is recovering well after his bypass surgery, and many friends stop to say how glad they are that our village mechanic will be back at work keeping our vehicles running. Tim is usually at the Methodist church on the Fourth of July, grilling hotdogs for the men’s group barbeque fundraiser, but this year he’s taking things a little easier. Younger men will step up to lead.

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THE VILLAGE

Like Tim and Caroline, and Andrew and Bethany, most of the village folk have been here for generations. Hinton came into being more than one hundred and fifty years ago when it was just a whistle-stop for steamboats plying goods to farms up and down the river. Then there were the boom years, when the pipe works employed four hundred men and brought a brief prosperity. Back then, Hinton had a racecourse and an opera house, and divas came on sternwheelers from Pittsburgh and sang for crowds.

It wasn’t always peaceful. One or two of our oldest folks can just remember the pipe works riot of 1935, when violence broke out between union strikers and law enforcement, and six men were shot, one fatally. Community feeling is powerful, though; six years and ‘a day that will live in infamy’ later, those same strikers and lawmen lined up together to volunteer in defense of the country they all called ‘home.’ What we have in common turns out to be more important than our differences.

Today the pipe works is gone, and the park where we are sitting, where neighbors gather for fireworks or to walk their dogs on wooded trails, has taken its place. Pyramids of clay tile still lurk in the underbrush where they have lain all the decades since the kilns were idled. Children play hide-and-seek where their great-grandfathers defended their rights as they saw them.

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THE PEOPLE

Cakes are sliced, and desserts passed around among the crowded benches and tents. The ginger cake is its usual success. Dusk settles over the village, and, right on schedule, the first rocket bursts in a golden fountain against the darkened sky. Children breathe a wonder-struck ‘ahh.’ At the high school stadium, the band begins to play. It’s like this every year.

Our future looks uncertain. Everywhere we see institutions we’ve always counted on, crumbling. Even at the very highest levels of our country, even in our churches, truths we thought could never be in doubt are being questioned—truths we have fought wars to defend.

But the fireworks we set off tonight celebrate more than a revolution, more than any merely human principles. They celebrate the spirit that built these farms, this village, the spirit that defended those truths; and sitting here now, among these people, on this soil, we’re surrounded by hope.   //

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This article was published in the July 2023 issue of Plain Values Magazine. If you want the latest stories every month, subscribe to the magazine HERE. As a special thanks, get 10% off your subscription with the code “GAB23”!

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