Changes

You can tell when one season is ending and another is beginning: festivals and fairs pop up in communities all over Southwest Virginia.

When summer bleeds into fall, counties hold fairs and communities follow with festivals. There’s Bluefield, Virginia’s Autumn Jamboree, Rich Creek’s AutumnFest, and Burke’s Garden’s Fall Festival. Cedar Bluff and the Italian community have Heritage Festivals, then there’s Down on the Farm Days and Oktoberfests. Apple picking festivals are in there someplace, along with homecomings, and reunions. Everywhere you turn, people celebrate the coming of fall. In other words, they celebrate nature’s most consistent message: nothing stands still, change is unending.

Festivals and holidays are one of the few times that people come together to embrace change. Usually they resist it, sometimes stridently. Newspapers and TV are filled with stories and images of demonstrations, marches or hot-under-the-collar town or city council meetings where people voice their concern or outrage about a proposed change. They might oppose building a new school, subdivision, or shopping center. Maybe they aren’t interested in a new road or traffic pattern. In Bluefield the last few years, the council has moved ahead with progress and growth too swiftly for some of its citizens. This past election, they voted out of office those who had been working for change.

Bluefield is a microcosm for what happens elsewhere. One hundred miles to the east, Roanoke has its Victory Stadium brouhaha. As an outsider, I can’t see spending money on an out-of-date stadium that’s located in a floodway. Bluefield faces the same problem. Much of its downtown is located on Beaver Pond Creek, which floods often. In Bluefield, the outcry has been over razing Town Hall (which stood in the floodpath), and the proposed building of a new one away from downtown. While concerned people couldn’t keep Bluefield’s Town Hall intact, a vocal group of Roanoke citizens has been successful in keeping the old stadium’s existence in limbo. However, in the words of Abbie Hoffman, “Sacred cows make the tastiest hamburgers.”

Robert Frost said that nature teaches us this in a subtle way: “Nature is always hinting at us. It hints over and over again.” That’s because nature is always in flux with changing seasons, blooming flowers, moving clouds, migrating birds, and erupting volcanoes. It also hints of a dynamic universe with Earth’s cache of dinosaur bones and diamonds, and Heaven’s bounty of infant stars.

I don’t think we have nature’s lessons in mind when we visit festivals where we buy homemade breads and candles, apple butter, and baskets. It’s not on our minds when we buy picnic foods and fireworks for the Fourth of July, a celebration of one of the biggest changes the world has ever seen -- a handful of colonies rebelled and separated from the most dominant country in the world. Most of the time we don’t get the hint that when we stand still we are actually moving backward.

Winter Creek that runs at the edge of my front lawn teaches me that. Once each year my husband brings out the shovel to straighten the creek’s little channel that over the months eats into our lawn. It’s a yearly ritual, for the creek is always moving, winding, and digging into the earth as it looks for a path of least resistance. Sometimes we fend off damage by placing rocks in the vulnerable places, which the water can easily erode. If we did nothing, Winter Creek would reclaim our yard.

While Winter Creek is nature’s way of saying we have to be alert to its relentless movement, the lack of streetlights on Wintercreek Drive is our punishment for resisting change. Years ago, when the electric company wanted to install ornamental lights in our neighborhood, many residents balked. Today, the few streetlights we have are in the yards of those folks who welcomed them.

Change, especially when it’s unexpected or its effect unclear, scares people. As someone said once, “If you haven’t practiced batting, you don’t want to face Sandy Koufax.” Nature understands this. Most of the time, it changes gradually with one season melting into the next, with leaves turning colors before they fall, with creeks cutting slowly into yards to forewarn of their encroachment. Slow and steady gives us time to accept change and celebrate it.

George Washington Carver understood the true reason for fall festivals: “Young people, I want to beg of you, always keep your eyes open to what Mother Nature has to teach you. By doing so you will learn many valuable things every day of your life.”