Mayor Newhard: These Days

In the heat of a summer’s day, in a car with the windows down, the radio on – the world flies by. It’s hard to capture these moments, these days. They are filled with a combination of anxiety and promise, discouragement, and hope. It has been a six-month saga that has been filled with concerns for our personal well-being and that of our community. We have seen the severity of a health crisis, a pandemic, play out before us and it continues. We have lost friends, family, and we’ve had to change everything we do, including the daily human interactions we took for granted. 

Isolation, quarantine, take on new meaning. A pause in our activities has a ripple effect that we didn’t see at first glance. Normally, this column and our local papers would be filled with the activities of our seasonal calendar – events that bring us together. Every day we try to make sense of it and maybe wish it were a dream.

But this is it for now. It is a time that has given us new clarity as to what is important and what to let go of. We, as a community, are doing the hard work of keeping an invisible menace under control. I am grateful and pleased by the responsiveness of individuals, civic groups, and organizations. The business community has redefined how to do business and how to stir an economy that had been stalled. We are a community of helping hands, creative minds, and pragmatic dreamers.\ Warwick is a quilt of hills and vale’s, woodlands and pastures, streams and lakes, and lively villages and hamlets. It is physically such an impressive place – this great, wide, beautiful valley. I urge you to go to our website and view Michael McVey’s video homage, “The Same River Twice.” It captures the breadth of this extraordinary land and from your armchair or desk you can see, and remind yourself, although these days are like no others, this land is a bond, it is a promise to our children and the remarkable days ahead.

The next Village Board meeting will take place on Mon., Aug. 3, at 7:30 p.m. and will be held through Zoom videoconference and may be viewed live by the public on the Village’s Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/VillageofWarwick.