What We Give Each Other

Notes from Singing Bridge on living generously together

There is a particular hush that settles over the Village just before Christmas. The days seem to hold their breath. Even the Singing Bridge — our faithful span of steel and memory—slows itself, as if admiring its Holiday ensemble and listening for something familiar it can’t quite name.

This is the season when the world gets loud about what we should want — more gifts + more gold + more sparkle + more boxes arriving on porches. And yet, year after year, what actually carries us through the dark isn’t more—it’s closer. Not the newest thing, but the people we can reach across the table to touch (or catch up on the Nordic trail to tickle).

Around Singing Bridge, this shows up in small, ordinary ways. Someone writes a new song for Singing Bridge — an offering, not a performance, a thread added to the larger weave — please stay tuned! Someone checks on the elders before a storm, not out of duty, but out of recognition: your well-being is bound up with mine. Someone lends a snowblower, a story, a bed for extra guests. Time itself is given—the extra, unhurried hour of listening that says, you matter.

French onion soup, a family favorite, appears without announcement, and extra helpings are placed in the freezer “for your daughter’s arrival”. Kids move freely between houses, borrowing skates, sleds, and entire sledding hills, knowing there is always a place at the table for them (and of course, who bakes the best cookies and when to show up just as they come out of the oven). Dogs belong to everyone. Occasionally, horses and goats do too. The light from one porch somehow makes the whole street brighter.

This way of living does not dazzle. It would not sell well in a catalog. But it endures. It nourishes. Sharing what we have and tending one another strengthens something essential in us. There is a deep steadiness that comes from knowing you are not an isolated self, but a vital strand in a living web—part of a community strong enough to hold sorrow, to multiply joy, and to amplify the light together rather than retreat into sad separateness. When this remembering is alive, loneliness loosens its grip. A knock comes at the door. A hand lifts in greeting from the bridge. A neighbor notices when your lights have not come on and pauses, listens, and reaches out. These are small acts, yet they restore us to our place in the great web of life, where nothing exists alone, and care moves naturally, like breath, from one being to another.

As Christmas approaches and the bridge glows again, maybe this is the quiet invitation of the season. Not to add more, but to gather more. To remember that the richest things we pass along are not wrapped or priced. They are time. Care. Forgiveness. Warmth. The comfort of knowing someone would miss you if you didn’t show up.

The Singing Bridge has always understood this. It doesn’t rush anyone. It hums. It waits. And if you listen closely—especially now—it reminds us that the greatest gift isn’t something we buy or give away. It’s the way we show up for one another, year after year, crossing together.