In my home state of Vermont, annual Town Meeting Day takes place at the chilly edge of spring. Vermonters rightly take pride in the usual civility of these events. That said, early March can be a tricky time to debate school taxes, road bonds, or town forest management issues. By winter’s end, many of us are frayed around the edges. Disagreements that can seem very personal now will lose much of their force when warblers have returned and long-spurred violets are blooming in the woods.
My family calls these weeks before the vernal solstice “sheriffing season.”
“Sheriffing” is a term that my husband and I adapted from the novel All That I Have by Castle Freeman Jr. In case you’ve missed out on this author, he’s a brilliant, funny writer who focuses on the lives of people in rural northern New England. I discovered him through a 2008 “Wood Lit” review by Northern Woodlands cofounder Stephen Long, praising Freeman’s dazzling short novel, Go With Me. I’ve been a fan ever since.
In All That I Have, protagonist Sheriff Lucian Wing performs his job with patience and wry resignation about human nature. Often, his sheriffing involves strategic inaction. For example, speaking of a young man whom he hopes to keep out of serious trouble, Wing explains, “The idea is that you give them a little cover, so they have a little room to screw up, a little time to come around.”
In our home usage – off-label and not author prescribed – sheriffing originally meant steely-willed forbearance while parenting young children. In those toddler years, my husband and I sheriffed tantrums, puddle mud hair sculpting, and games of “how much sawdust can you pour down your sibling’s pants?” Over time, the term has broadened to apply to any situation where it’s tempting to intervene or comment, but the wise choice is to wait, let people settle down – and, often, problems resolve on their own.
I bring up all this because, as I reach my 17th spring living in rural New England, I’m looking back, and remembering with a cringe the moments when kind people sheriffed me. No, I didn’t pour sawdust down anyone’s pants. But I did join town committees and immediately try to “fix” things. It took time to get my footing in this place, to recognize that what might at first seem a straightforward issue was embedded in bigger, harder considerations such as identity, history, and sense of place. In my role as a forest owner, too, I’m much more appreciative now that my land is part of other people’s stories, from half-century-old recollections of hauling sugaring pails, to favorite views and walking trails.
We’ve just endured another hard winter. We’re all coping with a lot of change. As we engage in difficult discussions, including important ones about forest uses and values, let’s choose our words carefully and kindly. And grant each other a little extra grace.