Alderperson Sheri Hartzheim’s Invocation At 11/03/2021 Common Council Meeting – “I hope that each of us can glory in this month’s times for remembrance and honor and thanksgiving, despite the impending doom—I mean, the winter ahead.”

Mayor Woodford: Tonight’s invocation will be delivered by Alderperson Hartzheim…I gotta fish for the mic. Which? That was close.

Alderperson Hartzheim: Thank you, Chair. Here we are folks in the 11th month. How is it the 11th month already? The month of honor and remembrance on the 11th day at the 11th hour. And the month of Thanksgiving. It’s the time of the year when the weather takes a sharp and earnest turn towards the cold and we’ll be asked to endure this for what seems like the next half a trip around the sun.

I’m sure I’m not along in my sincere, let’s just say, distaste for Wisconsin winters. I have to force myself outside on these colder days and search for things to appreciate in the cold. 

In the late 1840s Henry David Thoreau went into the woods to live deliberately on Walden Pond in Concord Massachusetts, and no doubt froze his civilly disobedient tuckus off during the winters there. In November 1860 he wrote, “Summer is gone with all its infinite wealth, and still nature is genial to man. Though he no longer bathes in the stream or reclines on the bank or plucks berries on the hills, he still beholds the same inaccessible beauty around him.” There’s optimism in those words and in that optimistic vein, I hope that each of us can glory in this month’s times for remembrance and honor and thanksgiving, despite the impending doom—I mean, the winter ahead.

As Thoreau also wrote, “Live each season as it passes. Breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.”