Each week I eagerly await the arrival in my home mailbox of The Wind, the simple newsletter from Vinalhaven, the island 15 miles off the coast of Maine that we visit each summer. Twelve hundred hearty souls live there year round, making it Maine’s largest permanent off shore community. While there are many reasons that I so anticipate settling down with The Wind and reading it cover to cover, I have noticed an interesting phenomenon on its pages as the financial crisis has exerted its grip on almost every corner of the globe.
Usually, the front page contains announcements of various community events, news of islanders convalescing from an illness or an accident, and a few letters of thanks to the whole community. Starting sometime this fall, the letters of thanks started to increase; the front page of a recent issue contained only such notices. They all go something like this:
“We want to thank everyone for all the food, cards, words, kind deeds, and
money they gave when we had our accident. This reminded us that we live in the
best place on earth. Still, we were really overwhelmed by the outpouring of concern.”
These thank you notices, which are all paid advertisements, used to be printed to thank people for their expressions of condolence following a death, for the lengths someone would go to in order to evacuate a seriously ill person from the island in the middle of the night during a horrendous storm, or for some generous response to some other fairly extreme event. Now, people are expressing their gratitude for even “smaller” acts of kindness – someone stopping to help out when a truck slid off an icy road; the fire company responding to a chimney fire; a group helping to find a lost dog; the town road crew clearing the streets swiftly after a blizzard; the power company laboring all night to restore service; the local organic farmer sharing a winter root vegetable harvest with anyone who wanted or needed something.
In a world that seems to have slipped out of individuals’ control, it is as if this community has recognized that in reaching out to others, in expressing gratitude for kindness, and in doing more for those that surround them, they can exert a profoundly powerful and palliative influence on their worlds. I don’t know if the proliferation of such front page notices has led to an even greater number of kind acts or if islanders are simply more mindful about expressing their gratitude for the precious kindness that surrounds them. But I can’t help thinking how wonderful it would be if the “sophisticated” newspapers of the world followed The Wind’s lead and made expressions of gratitude the front page news they deserve to be.