Spring

 by Anne Farrer Scott

 

During the winter of 1982-83, Minneapolis was “bleak and frigid, like on the icy planet of Hoth,” or so my son Timothy, then five, told me. I had not seen “The Empire Strikes Back”as he had (twice), but I couldn’t help agreeing with him. The world had never before seemed quite so cold and desolate.

 Usually winter is, for me, a time of coziness, a time of crocheting and making cocoa for Timothy and his little sister, Elizabeth, when they–cheeks red and noses running–come in from sledding. But that winter was full of great unease. My husband undertook a study of nuclear weapons, and as I sat sewing on buttons, he would read aloud a particularly gruesome statistic. “There are enough of these things to kill each man, woman, and child in the world 49 times,” he would say. “Did you know,” he would ask (of course I didn’t; I didn’t want to know), “that this planet spends a million dollars a minute on armaments?” My throat would tighten. I would change the subject and pretend to myself that I hadn’t heard.

While my husband pondered missiles, Timothy studied dinosaurs. “Which is the biggest dinosaur?” he would ask. I always forgot. “Brachiosaurus.”  At supper, he would inspect his spaghetti and ask, “Could a Tyrannosaurus rex eat up our house? Our whole house?” We often talked about how the dinosaurs are gone from the earth. “Why?” asked Timothy, and all my husband and I could say was, “Nobody knows for sure.”

In January a dear friend of ours died. “Where is Helen?" Timothy asked. “With God”, we said–a flimsy response to someone seeking hard facts, someone wanting geography (Minneapolis? Heaven?), not theology. “How is her body?” he wanted to know. “Still, quiet,” we said. “When will she come back to life?” he asked. “She won’t,” we said. “I do not want to die,” he grimly replied.

That winter Timothy drew: dinosaurs, his family, his house, ghosts, sometimes a sky full of bombs dripping blood. He was, after all, only five years old, and he was not exactly sure how a bomb works. We did not have the heart to tell him.

 Beginning in February, Timothy and Elizabeth would press their noses against the living room window and look at the thick snow covering the ground and ask, “Is spring under there?” We said yes. The snow would melt briefly, and though we sometimes saw hints of green, by mid-April our crocuses had been snowed upon three times. We kept telling the children that there were flowers growing in our garden, but after a while they didn’t believe us anymore.

At the end of that long winter, that winter that seemed never to end, I was listening to my husband, I was hearing the bad news, I was worrying about my children and their future. I decided to  sit in at Honeywell, Inc., a Minneapolis based manufacturer of cluster bombs and parts for MX and cruise missiles. I was ready to be civil (“How are you this morning?”  I would ask the officer arresting me”) disobedient. As it turned out, so were 156 other people.

On a (finally!) sunny April morning, my husband, my son, and I went to Honeywell. “You are only three,” Timothy told Elizbeth, “so you can’t go.” Elizabeth cannot wait for her fifth birthday, then she, too, will study dinosaurs, draw ghosts, and go to demonstrations.

There were many things at the protest to please Timothy: a good assortment of vehicles (police cars, vans, a school bus); a clown handing out balloons; the balloon itself–fine, big, and pink, with flowers and “love” written on it; lots of police officers with guns (“real guns”) in their holsters; much singing and chanting.

 I sat with a group of protesters in front of a door and sang: “Like the tree that sta-ands by the wa–ater, We shall not be moved.” Timothy, puzzled, watched us sing, until, under arrest, we were escorted or carried to a waiting school bus. “What does that song mean?”  he asked his father. “It means, his father told him, “that they are being arrested because they won’t leave Honeywell’s property. They won’t change their minds. Even in jail they”ll still think it’s wrong to make bombs.” Timothy nodded. This made perfect sense to a little boy who goes to bed each night against his better judgment and who knows what it is to have your body moved but your mind decided otherwise.

Timothy and his father stayed until I was arrested. Timothy looked serious, his eyes were dark, but he liked the demonstration. (“Will there be one to go to tomorrow?” he wanted to know.)  He sang “ Give Peace a Chance.” He worried when a police officer tore down the roses a protester had tied to a Honeywell entrance, but when his balloon popped, a police officer beside him sympathized. “That’s the way it is with balloons,” he said. “Maybe you can find another one.” Timothy did, and when a reporter asked him what he thought of the protest, Timothy opined, “I think they should make balloons and not bombs.”

Going to the protest didn’t really solve anything. I spent eight days in the Hennepin County Adult Correctional Facility that fall; Honeywell is still making weapons; and Timothy has more questions to trouble him than before he left home that April morning (“But Star Wars is all right, isn’t it?” he asked his father as they left the demonstration). But certainly we feel more hopeful and more brave, and not so uneasy. We had faced our fears and had acted upon them with others. In that action of a community, of love, we found hope, hope to nourish and strengthen us as we try to follow the teaching of William Penn: “Let us then try what love will do: for if men did once see we love them, we should soon find they would not harm us…. Force may subdue, but Love gains; and he that forgives first, wins the laurel.”

  The weekend after the protest, I decided that it was truly spring and time for earnest cleaning, so I gathered up all our woolen clothes for storage. At the dry cleaner's the clerk gave us a receipt for our itchy winter garments, but Timothy told her we didn’t need it. “We’ve got a ticket at home,” he explained proudly, “because my mom was arrested at the demonstration.”

 

 

Anne Farrer Scott who recently passed away was a mother, a journalist and formerly practiced law. She was for many years a Quaker with an interest in Buddhism. She is survived by her spouse Stephen Scott.(This article was published in the March 15, 1985 Friend’s Journal.)  

Any views or opinions contained herein are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Iowa Peace Network (IPN).