Cindy Atoji Keene is a former supplements editor and copy editor at the Boston Herald. She is also a longtime contributor to the Boston Globe and has acted as creative director at Science and Theology News.
There’s a joke that goes: “What are the four seasons in New England? Winter, still winter, and three months of bad sledding.” Any shrewd Yankee – or wise visitor – chuckles at this saying but knows it just ain’t true. Rather, winter in the northeast is a wonderland of opportunity. As the sage Henry David Thoreau observed, “a healthy man, indeed, is the complement of the seasons, and in winter, summer is in his heart.” And in Concord, where Thoreau tread across snowy dells and meadows blanketed in white, hearts are “warm and cheery, like cottages under drifts, whose windows and doors are half concealed, but from whose chimneys the smoke cheerfully ascends.”
When the electric streetcar was first introduced in Concord in 1901, it transformed the town. It meant that the borough was no longer defined by walking distance. The trolley, which resembled a railroad car, revolutionized country travel. One resident was recorded in 1901 saying, “The trolley cars brought people to Concord and took people out of Concord. It was a very happy day when electric cars came.”
Flash forward to Concord 2022, when the Concord Trolley is again reshaping transportation.
Concord has the cure for nature-deficit-disorder, a condition that worsened during the pandemic. As kids and parents spend more time indoors and less time in nature, they’re becoming more stressed and anxious. But as the beloved sage of Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Live in the sunshine, swim in the sea, drink the wild air.”
