Twenty Something
It’s Wednesday morning on Lower Grey Cloud Island, a wooded retreat tucked 15 miles down the Mississippi River from St. Paul, Minnesota. The world feels lush and fertile, birdsong rising through a canopy of maples.
An old wooden shed sits in dappled sunlight. Inside, a cupboard stores jars of maple syrup — quarts, pints, 16 oz., 8 oz. — their prices marked in embossing tape inside the door.
The store is always open and unstaffed, operating on the honor system: Open the rickety top drawer, record your purchase in the little spiral notebook, leave your cash.
“We’ve never had any shenanigans,” says Mary, 91, the matriarch of the 50-year-old, four-generation business.
The system has always worked.
The spiral notebook reads like a guestbook and a moral code. Hearts and exclamation points fill the margins. A quart purchased March 22 includes the note: “God’s blessings to you!” A week later, another entry reads: “Happy Easter!”
Mary relishes these “little tidbits,” as she puts it.
“We have faith in people, and we have never been disappointed, and I pray that that won’t change,” says Mary, a devout Christian. “It makes me feel like: ‘OK, God, I get it: You’re in charge of me, aren’t you?’ We look for the good — and see the good. We’ve had so many people come into our home and just love on us. We love on them and share what we have.”
She interrupts herself to point out a red-headed woodpecker that has landed outside her kitchen window. “It just came two days ago!” she exclaims, pumping her fists in unabashed glee. “It’s one of my favorites. I’ve got all kinds — there’s a grosbeak up there! And we’ve got the hummingbird that just came back. Ahhh!”
Mary and her 93-year-old husband, Rod, are well equipped to study the birds of Grey Cloud Island, with bird feeders dotting their home, bird guides stacked on their dining-room table and a pair of binoculars perched on the hutch.
Lately I’ve been collecting stories like this one. They’re bright, cheerful patches for a pair of ripped jeans. We may feel battered by headlines, we may be hotly divided, but a shopper still stops to prop up a row of grocery-store ferns toppled by the wind. Another one finds me in the parking lot to tell me I left behind a loaf of bread.
A general manager takes the time to watch surveillance footage to help an 11-year-old track down money that blew away on the restaurant patio, and when it doesn’t surface, he offers two free meals “to offset the sting.” A big, burly man saves up breadcrumbs to feed to the geese. And a 17-year-old at Dowling Catholic High School in West Des Moines jumped a 6-foot fence to help rescue a neighbor lady from a fire.
These stories don’t erase hardship. But they push back against cynicism.
Perhaps this is part of our Christian call: to seek out signs of hope. If we look, we will surely find them.
People are still good — even when no one’s looking.
When you witness a quiet act of kindness, you feel the lift. You remember we’re all connected. And you’re inspired to do the next right thing, to continue the streak of “no shenanigans.”
The maples on Grey Cloud Island still get tapped every year, and the sweetness still rises. Maybe that is our work, too: to keep tapping into goodness, gathering evidence where we find it and sharing it with others.
Christina Capecchi is a freelance writer from Grey Cloud Island, Minnesota.