Minutes before we were to walk onstage in front of 400 people, I asked my five-year-old daughter if she was nervous.
My wife and I, along with six other amazing, caring individuals, had been working all year long to organize and run Snugfest, an annual music festival that raises money for local nonprofits. This has meant sacrifices for our family: late nights working for the adults, late bedtimes for our daughter, weekends built around meetings and events, dinners interrupted by phone calls, and moments when one or both of us had to be somewhere else when we would rather have been “slouched on the couch” (as our daughter says.)
Finally, that work had paid off, and the festival’s founder wanted to introduce the group, along with our daughter, to the audience out on the lawn of Middlebury Snowbowl.
“Sometimes I get a little shy when there’s lots of people looking at me or when I have to talk to people,” she replied, and then added, “I hope I don’t have to say anything!”
I told her I get nervous when I have to do those things, too, but all she had to do was go out on that stage and wave.
To the annoyance of probably everyone around me, I talk about community a lot. And I often think about how fortunate my family is to live among so many people who actively care for the community we share. I think about the sacrifices we see people make every day, in ways both small and large, to keep our communities safe and vibrant and full of life.
But I also think about my child, and what she is learning from all this work to build and maintain community.
What is she experiencing when she sees our neighbors helping put away chairs after a town meeting? What does she think when we take time out of our day to go help a neighbor? How does she feel when I miss a bedtime because I’m at a Selectboard or committee meeting in town? What does it mean to her to know that there are so many adults, just like her mom and dad, out in our town and our community doing this work every day?
She’s begun learning about community in kindergarten, to my absolute delight, and I’ve been asking her about it on the car ride home from school. The other day, she told me she’d learned that a community is “a group of people that live in the same place.”
“Yes, that’s true. What else do you know about community?” I asked.
“Well, I already knowed (sic) that it’s where people are kind and do things for everyone,” she said.
I hope she always knows that.
I hope that the memory of being onstage, under the bright lights and hearing the applause of hundreds of people, sticks with her. I hope she saw that a small group of people, willing to give their time and their work, can do amazing things for their community. I hope she remembers what it felt like to look out from that stage and see all that joy and positivity and light, and that someday she understands that none of it simply appeared. People made it happen.
And I hope I will always remember that shy smile on her face as she gave her little princess wave to the crowd.
– Bill Hunsinger is an Addison County community leader raising a 5-year-old daughter in the mountains of Ripton