Sunshine Committee seeks to overwhelm Johnson staff with cinnamon-y, pumpkin-y bounty.
We got yer pumpkin spice right here.
The long and the short of it:
Please click here to sign up to help the indomitable Jenn Maeng of the Sunshine Committee provide the JES staff with an overflowing cornucopia of autumnal refreshments.
Alternatively, the PTO recognizes that you are a busy lot. Just send us a few bucks via our Venmo, stick a sunshine or fall-themed emoji in the comment section, and we’ll make sure that money is spent on bringing the Johnson staff some delicious fall treats next Friday.
You don’t have to keep reading. All of the relevant information has been conveyed already. Just click one of the links above, sign up to bring in some tea or muffins or to help clean up afterwards or just send us some cash, and get on with your hectic day with our sincere gratitude.
What does it mean, to bring the sunshine, in the middle of fall? Does the metaphor at the core of the notion of a “Sunshine Committee” change with the seasons? Is the seasonality of life, here, in the fat part of the globe, part of what gives the metaphor its utility, its comprehensibility, and even its beauty? Does the PTO in Fairbanks, Alaska, where the sun does not set for much of the summer, have a “Sunshine Committee,” or would that just be pouring it on? North of there, in Barrow (now Utqiagvik), would getting an email from your PTOs “Sunshine Committee” in the midst of 60+ days of polar night be welcome, or would it seem like something of a cruel joke?
All of these are silly questions that you could have gone many, many lifetimes without even remotely considering if you had just stopped reading, as suggested above.
Henry David Thoreau—an American poet who reversed his given first and middle names for no good reason except that it pretty obviously sounds cooler that way—wrote (among lots of other things) the following poem about mortality, time, and grief, and also about the autumn sun.
I Am The Autumnal Sun
Sometimes a mortal feels in himself Nature
— not his Father but his Mother stirs
within him, and he becomes immortal with her
immortality. From time to time she claims
kindredship with us, and some globule
from her veins steals up into our own.
I am the autumnal sun,
With autumn gales my race is run;
When will the hazel put forth its flowers,
Or the grape ripen under my bowers?
When will the harvest or the hunter's moon
Turn my midnight into mid-noon?
I am all sere and yellow,
And to my core mellow.
The mast is dropping within my woods,
The winter is lurking within my moods,
And the rustling of the withered leaf
Is the constant music of my grief…
The above is reprinted without permission, as Thoreau died more than 160 years ago and was unavailable as of press time.
Thoreau’s take on the autumn sun is of course informed by his longitude and latitude as much as his temporal place in the middle of the American industrial revolution. It is a metaphor born of where and when he stands. It relies on the relatively universal fact of life here on the third planet from the sun—what with its seasons of growth and seasons of harvest and seasons of death and dormancy—of course, but the sentiment is contingent on time and place, as are all sentiments. It is beautiful, but perhaps only on the strength of its final four lines, though your mileage will vary, no doubt.
Even the grief of the autumnal sun is the grief of an ending appropriately arriving, the grief an impossible gift, arriving when it is meant to arrive. An inevitability. A welcome grief, given the unthinkable alternatives.
What does the sunshine mean, in the middle of fall?
In our case—in the teachers’ lounge inside an elementary school—it is a moment to simply say thanks.
But whether you care for the various particular and prescribed fall flavors of cinnamon and apple and pumpkin on offer, the dull browns and the burnt oranges, once you’ve had your fill of sweet and spice—the point is not the food and drink, as the days get shorter and the sun shines from just slightly farther, and further, away, at an angle less conducive to warming, at a distance that encourages stealing away, and hiding, and waiting—the point is the moment. A moment of grief, and of gratitude.
So, uhh, click the links at the top and buy the teachers some muffins, or whathaveyou. Thanks!