Why We Light The Bridge

There are places that become more than the sum of their steel beams, timbers, or trusses. Places where the practical gives way to the symbolic, where the ordinary becomes a threshold. The Singing Bridge—once a metal-grated span that hummed and sang beneath our tires as we crossed the Kingsbury Branch—has always been one of those places.

North Montpelier itself was once one of Vermont’s great rural innovation centers. A true engine of central Vermont’s economy, it thrived with brickworks, lumber mills, woolen factories, a musical organ maker, a whiskey distillery, a bobbin works, toolmakers, printing presses, poets, musicians, a legenday dance hall, three country stores, a creamery, a beloved beach for swimming, and a density of invention hard to imagine now. But like so many rural villages, it was undone by shifting technologies, new roads, and the gravitational pull of larger towns. The mills closed, families moved on, and little by little, the village center hollowed out.

And yet—here, too, green shoots are emerging. Pick-up hockey has returned to the pond. Community potlucks are back. And each winter, villagers gathered for carols and what is already becoming a beloved tradition: the holiday lighting of the Singing Bridge. It is a reminder that the story of this village was never over—only waiting for its next chorus of voices.

In a time of fracture and polarization, when the world feels as if it is splintering into smaller, sharper pieces, we choose—quietly, stubbornly, luminously—to bridge. We light the Singing Bridge not because lights can erase the darkness, but because shared light has always been a way human beings say: I’m here. You are not alone. We care and can find our way together.

Every December, when neighbors arrive with boxes of warm lights, wreaths, garlands, ribbons, pinecones, and handmade ornaments, we are doing more than decorating. We are practicing collective hope. We are rehearsing generosity. And we are signaling to anyone passing through the winter dusk that something alive is gathering again in this once-collapsed mill town.

Lighting the Singing Bridge is not nostalgia. It is design. It is placemaking as an act of devotion and defiance. It is us leaning into what we do have: creativity, curiosity, community, and the fierce resourcefulness of rural people who can turn scarcity into abundance with wreaths of balsam, lights, and a 20-foot extension cord.

This small ritual is part of a much larger one now—our shared effort to rebuild a historic village at a time when rural communities everywhere are faltering. We are crafting a new model here: a bioregional resilience village where neighbors heat locally, grow food together, care for land and each other, and imagine futures that fit within planetary boundaries. A place that proves human flourishing and ecological humility can walk hand in hand.

The Singing Bridge becomes our beacon in that work. A lantern held up to say: We are still here. We are still choosing the light. We are actively bridging and choosing to care about each other.

Perhaps that is what bridging means now—repairing the world one small crossing at a time. Making a path through the dark wide enough for all of us. Creating a visible reminder that community is not an accident; it is a practice. A willingness to show up with whatever we have, however small, and add it to the common light.

So we gather. We wrap the rails in evergreens and weave lights along the trusses. We laugh, we problem-solve, we tie bows with mittened hands. And when the switch flips, and the bridge begins to glow, something ancient in us stirs.

The village we are rebuilding is not just a place.

It is a promise.

And the Singing Bridge is where that promise begins to shine.

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Please join us this Sunday at 1 p.m., as we gather to cast a little more light and love across the Singing Bridge. Bring whatever feels right in your hands or in your heart — strands of lights, balsam boughs, ribbons, ornaments, or simply your own presence. Anything meaningful can be woven into this place.

Every offering, no matter how humble, becomes part of the Bridge’s quiet glow — a shared act of collective care in a season that asks us to remember how much we can illuminate when we turn toward one another. Come add your light to ours.