The Pittsburgh Press (March 19, 1946)
I DARE SAY —
This perilous Spring
By Florence Fisher Parry
It is hard to reconcile this Spring with the headlines. It is such a tender Spring. The skies are full of unshed tears, the earth is trembling with birth pangs, the old re-affirmation of life everlasting confronts us at every turn. Overnight bloom has changed the black twigs to yellow and the hills have put on their green veils. The birds now begin their hallelujah with the dawn, and at night the moon and stars draw close to earth, the better to see the ancient miracle of resurrection.
While in the hearts of men the awful fear moves again, furtively: Is there to be no peace? Is War to come, this time complete, and all the work of man and nature to disappear in final cataclysm?
I do not understand this awful game between the titans. I do not understand how even giants – Churchill, Stalin – can risk such rashness, can make a move, utter a syllable, that could so much as stir the awful wind.
I do not understand how even the word war dare be juggled, knowing the meaning of the word – as we do now! Is all that we have been warned a lie, a childish bugaboo, deliberate propaganda to fool us into fear? Is there no truth in what we have been fed about the atom bomb and its threat to our very existence? Was Hiroshima a dream?
O wretched world, that given a terrible tool it is not fit to handle, it has to wait, impotent, all sense of security gone, upon the awful whims of mortal titans who have the power to will extinction!
Something more
I drove up home the other day, over the rolling hills of Pennsylvania, this rich and lovely state! The air was moist with freshness, the earth seemed almost to move under its thin new moss; the lovely pastels of early blooms showed here and there in bashful scarcity.
We drove through many little towns, and we could see the housecleaning going on! Painting and planting, cleaning and washing, repairing and replenishing, the country bustle of Spring was everywhere!
I had some city passengers. They conceded the scenery. Yes, it was lovely. But the little towns! How dull and static, how really stupid to live there! And as we dipped down into our own particular valley where Punxsutawney lay, all that there was to show was… why… yes… a rather ugly, certainly plain and typical town, with a stringy Main Street, two bridges at its ends, a clutter of stores and a row of homes set apart by conventional yards, and… and… nothing else, really. Just another town.
They’d have had to be us to understand; they’d have to be born and raised there; changed with its changes; mellowed with its aging; known, as we had come to know, the drama and fullness-of-living that went on behind the facades of those old, now faded, homes along our Main Street. They’d have had to go to our churches and reunions and – funerals. Especially the funerals.
Suddenly I saw that there was no way to “show” them Punxsutawney. There was nothing there to show. No places. No things. Nothing tangible at all. Just what-had-happened-there. And you don’t empty your memories into the laps of those-who-come-to-call.
The last refuge
We went into the town library, which used to be a home, and all the 18 thousand books within it now did not contain a story or history or drama as known or dear or wonderful to me as the memories contained there. It had housed so much! Just to touch its walls, its banisters; just to walk through its doors and stand there where those I knew and loved had died, gave me a wave of such remembered security as all the United Nations councils could never provide! …
I found myself saying: “This house will stand here a long time. … It is far from any city. Its walls are of stone and very thick, and its foundation is like a rock, impregnable. It is unlikely, even in the next war, for any Atom bomb to strike near. I would feel safe here.”
My visitors were impressed. Our town took on a sudden inspiration. It stood for refuge, security; it stood for something saved, out of any cataclysm that might be willed by the titans.
“Yes,” they conceded, “it would be a safe place to come back to.”
A safe place to come back to.
But that’s what I had been trying to convey all along! Our town – your town – all the small towns of America. Safe to come back to.
Not just from bombs. But other things. It does not do to get too far away from Main Street. There are virtues that thrive there more easily than elsewhere. There are conventions preserved there which we would be wise not to throw away.
Oh, there is sin there, and much hypocrisy, and smallness thrives, narrowness prevails, and gossip is everywhere! But there’s a great incentive to be decent in a small town. Work, too, has to be honest to thrive. If a doctor makes mistakes in diagnosis and treatment, they become known, and his patients fall off. If a lawyer pulls a dirty deal his practice drops off. If a husband or wife is untrue, their reputation’s gone – adultery is a difficult thing to get away with in Punxsutawney.
One is more apt to live up to himself and more in a small town – one is more apt to live.