What’s Up Worcester? Meet your new WUW Managing Editor, Betsey, through her unusual storytelling. It is her personal mission to portray not only the news but also hope and vision in the community.
We feel the collective pain and stress about SNAP, the rising cost of living and food prices, and the upcoming municipal elections (Go Vote on Nov. 4!)- and we hear you. But hear me out:
We can find beauty and meaning in the madness. Let me tell you how…If you kick an idea around long enough, it will grow.
So I have this pumpkin patch, fat orange mounds poking their heads from broad green leaves, vines sneaking around the foundation of my home and opening their starlight blossoms to the bees. I did not plant it. Here’s what happened.
By Christmas, in my winter blues era, I got tired of last season’s Jack-o-lanterns oozing their rot onto my stoop. So…I kicked them into the mulch and kept it moving. I sank into winter hibernation mode, as I do every year, putting on the fuzzy socks and pulling up layer after layer of cozy afghans, and waited for spring.
All winter I immersed myself in books and research, simply because I am a nerd and my coaching business, though rewarding, doesn’t stretch my brain as far as I like it to go. Every book or post I read turns into a trip down the Google rabbit hole, and I love it. I have always enjoyed intellectual projects and writing, so I amassed a portfolio of work I didn’t intend to submit anywhere. Ask my kids: they will tell the tale of a blanket monster gobbling up books and spitting out pages.
It should be said here that winter doldrums are real, and even the brightest or most active (I do have a fitness business, and I did earn my college degrees) are not exempt from feeling lost or having rough times. I have had my share. I have also had difficulty tending and growing friendships in these times, but I have learned to keep moving in inches rather than miles, even if I am alone. I have come to believe I will always be okay, and I am. That is faith. So winter wore on and I kept writing for no reason…yet.
Well, about the same time as the sun began its higher arc through the morning fog and the trees were budding (or so I thought I saw through frosted glass), I got tired of last season’s books, and again my legs were restless, so…I kicked them off the bed and kept it moving.
Opening the door to spring in New England is a phenomenon known only to us who live here. The courage it takes to bust through the snow pile in your heart after a long winter takes faith that I know Worcester folks understand. The reward is that first breath of honeysuckle-scented air and the sounds of baby birds. That’s the feeling of rebirth. I assumed my position on the front stoop where the sun had warmed it. I sipped my coffee and thought about everything and nothing. I angled for the sun on my winter-bleached skin and then saw it.
These weird little vines are poking from between the foundation stone and out of the still-hard ground. I Googled them, of course, and affirmed they were pumpkin shoots. I didn’t know what to do with pumpkin shoots, so I watered them from time to time and then went away on summer vacation. I hoped for the best: that is Faith, too.
Off I jetted to Scandinavia with no plan except to figure out where to sleep and shop at the local grocery stores. I simply knew I was meant to find something there. Never mind, I don’t speak any language but English and a peu de francais y un poco de espanol. Something about roots was brewing in my heart, and I found myself at the Nordik Folke Museum at closing time. I time-traveled alone along the outdoor museum path, starting with huts and what we would call Viking churches; arches and peaks in dark wood and iron.
I didn’t feel lonely, though I couldn’t understand the signage. You see, my grandfather was 100 percent Norwegian, adopted some time in the 1920s, so somehow it just made sense to be there. It felt right: That is also faith.
The path took me to the early 1900s cottages, not too different from our colonial cape style homes, and because the museum was closed, I peeked in windows. I zoomed in on objects with my little digital pocket cam (I get this seems creepy, but no one lives in these homes) and there it was… My grandmother’s sewing machine with its sleek ebony arches and gold-foil curlies. It all made sense. I had the same one sitting in my basement for 25 years, and here it is in a museum.
And what does this have to do with pumkins you ask? Somehow from pumpkins to books, to kicking off the winter dust in a country that felt more familiar than not, taking in the stunning ladscapes and free admission museums of Norway, Denmark and Sweden, it just all connected: I was meant to do more than hibernate and wait for a seed to grow. I was meant to see connections and I was meant to share them with the world. I was meant to write. I had an urgency to affect change with my words and stop kicking things around and rather, tend them. So I put faith into action and recorded every single observation I could squeeze into the margins of my travel journal and the notes section of my phone. I dig deeper into the art and nature around me in these foreign country and I made a point of talking to everyone that crossed my path. Indeed I made friends across cultures and across oceans who like my weird curious energy and still speak with me today. I digress, often…
Being a writer is in my blood as much as my Norwegian heritage, my Massachusetts upbringing, the antiques I recognize, the spaces that feel familiar though they are foreign. I am meant to harvest stories and grow them into words to share with you. There’s that faith again. I believe I was destined speak to you through my work right here at What’s Up Worcester and maybe, just maybe, impact one person in my community. If this sounds crazy, remember the pumpkin vines? When I arrived home, I had a dozen pumpkins in front of my stoop with these big beautiful leaves and curly tendrils reaching to root themselves.
So I tended it: That is faith in action. I researched how to grow pumpkins and that led me to the Legend of the Three Sisters. Indigenous peoples right here in Worcester, the Nipmuc, cultivated pumpkin, corn and beans. These crops grow in a symbiotic way and sustained their people who lived in a symbiotoc way until unnatural forces of colonialism appropriated or destroyed the people and the crops. We eat these foods at Thanksgiving. I began an aimless article about Indigenous stories lost beneath Union Station and Webster Square Plaza. When I was done, I went ahead and submitted it to our Editor-in-Cheif Jerry here at What’s Up Worcester because, why not? That is also faith in action. Maybe you have read it:
So here we are, from pumpkins and window peeking in Europe, from hibernation to international friendship, and from journaling and reading in my spare time to being trusted as the Managing Editor of this incredible grassroots non-profit media source working with my new friends. (Never mind the run-on sentence. I will edit it later.)
I also have a dozen accidental pumpkins on my stoop and a dozen more I gave away to friends and neighbors. The successful pumpkins and the ability to write for and engage with you folks around me in Worcester are the roots that make me feel a little less like hibernating and a little more encouraged as the seasons turn to gray. I can see that Seeds+Faith+Action= Wonderfully beautiful unexpected things.
Seeds + Faith + Action =
thank you, BTK
Wonderfully beautiful unexpected things.
Post Script: This lady and this story may be crazier than me. Her belief, her faith, that this grilled cheese is the image of Mary blossomed into an international phenomenon. Click the image below to read about the $28,000 grilled cheese sold through faith and action. The news source is in Taiwan.
Worcester, it’s up to you to decide what is crazy, what feelings and ideas you tend and which you leave to faith. I believe we will be ok. and if today, you don’t believe, I will believe for you.
Betsey Taft Kennedy, What’s Up Worcester, Managing Editor, [email protected]
About The Author
