The Fifth Season

Is there something you wait for all year that when it comes it feels like it is its own season? Car enthusiasts know when new models are revealed and sports fans wait for the weather that’s ideal for baseball or football season. People anticipate the holidays. We’re in the midst of awards season for entertainers and entering summer months of reruns. Kids, parents, and teachers can long for school to begin – or end. Folks sanitize jars in preparation for canning time.

I was at a luncheon last week for Save the Children where the phrase ‘Hunger Season’ was introduced. While farmers that you and I may think of know planting, harvesting, and lambing times, there are farming communities worldwide who routinely have a Hunger Season. It’s the time of year when the crops are gone and the larders are bare.  There is no black market of food because there is no money with which to purchase anything imported.

Hunger Season is their norm, from generation to generation. Hunger Season comes every year and even knowing that, there is not much they can do about it. It comes routinely, either as part of the cycle of nature or because the militia has come through and burned the land. Whether the farmer is the mother or the father, when Hunger Season arrives ,they feel that have they failed in their profession and they believe they are failures at providing for and protecting their families. Hunger Season means the whole community is united in physical deprivation and psychological pain.

As someone whose relationship with food is as friend and consoler and who has never missed a meal, even when what was on the table was sparse, hearing of this fifth season had a profound impact on me. There we were, eating our upscale chicken dish with strawberries and raspberries in a parfait, while Hunger Season stories were being shared.

You know how you can hear or read something many times but suddenly the reality of what you are seeing or listening to finally sinks in? Like you, I’ve seen pictures of starvation in foreign places and have responded to a particularly eloquent appeal. I know that a high percentage of children here in the U.S. go to sleep hungry so I regularly take food to our local pantry. But, Hunger Season? I’m still mulling on that. Perhaps, now, you will too.

Marilyn