Soha Saghir and her friend Louisa Stoll braved the cold to vote on election night in Pennsylvania, and in a quick interview, made clear why they were there: abortion rights.

Ms. Saghir and Ms. Stoll, both 2021 graduates of Haverford College, are part of the wave of young voters who helped lift Democrats to a stronger-than-expected performance in this month’s midterms. Preliminary exit poll data suggests turnout for voters under 30 approached record levels for a midterm – and abortion was their No. 1 issue. The spark was the Supreme Court’s June ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade and devolved the legal status of abortion rights to the states.  

“I don’t feel super optimistic” about the future of reproductive rights on the national level, says Ms. Saghir, speaking on the Haverford campus, where she and her friend voted. But at the very least, the women agree, they can vote to support legal abortion in their state. 

In Pennsylvania, a crucial electoral battleground this cycle, Democrats defied political gravity. Despite an unpopular president, high inflation, and rising violent crime, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman captured a GOP-held U.S. Senate seat, helping Democrats lock in control of the chamber come January. Democrats also held the governor’s office, won a majority in the state House for the first time in 12 years, and saw all their congressional incumbents win.  

Democrats in Pennsylvania and elsewhere were aided by weak Republican candidates, many of them backed by former President Donald Trump. Republicans did win a narrow majority in the U.S. House, and won the national vote by about 3 percentage points. But the predicted “red wave” never materialized – in part, polls suggest, because of the abortion issue. 

Votes on ballot measures in California, Michigan, Vermont, Kentucky, and Montana all landed on the side of abortion rights, regardless of each state’s political lean. Those followed an August referendum in deep-red Kansas, where 59% voted in effect to keep the state’s constitutional right to abortion.

As with many political issues, the party seen as more extreme wound up getting penalized by voters. A large proportion of the public is in the middle on abortion – if the “middle” is defined as neither favoring nor opposing abortion rights in all cases, and including exceptions for rape and incest and to protect the life and health of the woman.

“If you’re out of that very large middle range, then your position is very unpopular,” says Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State University. “That’s the risk for each party.” 

Michael Conroy/AP

Opponents of abortion rally as the Indiana Senate Rules Committee meets to consider a Republican proposal to ban nearly all abortions in the state during a hearing at the Statehouse in Indianapolis, July 26, 2022. The debate over a limited set of circumstances in which abortion could be legal is causing divisions among GOP lawmakers in some states.

Danger of overreach 

In the midterms, President Joe Biden campaigned on abortion rights, calling on Congress to codify Roe. But that effort is stalled, leaving abortion access to the states for the foreseeable future. In a tacit acknowledgment of that reality, the Biden administration has pledged to ensure that women who want or need to travel across state lines to access the procedure will not be impeded. 

In the new, divided Congress, both parties may try to pass bills with no chance of becoming law, just to make a point. But there’s a danger of overreach – on both sides. 

“There will probably be an effort to pass some kind of national abortion ban, which is the very definition of outside the mainstream, if it includes no exceptions for rape or incest,” says Republican pollster Whit Ayres. 

Republicans won control of the House because voters want them to do something about inflation, crime, and border security, Mr. Ayres says – “not to ban all abortions, or cut off aid to Ukraine, or conduct endless investigations into the Biden administration.”

GOP politicians who support abortion rights – a small universe represented most prominently by Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine – say Democratic legislation advertised as codifying Roe in fact goes further, and thus can’t win broad support. Bipartisan legislation in the Senate known as the Reproductive Freedom for All Act has gone nowhere. 

Democratic strategists are also looking ahead. Pollster Celinda Lake predicts more statewide initiatives to enshrine abortion rights and other ways to drive the message home – both broadly and to targeted demographics. 

In the 2022 midterms, more than $428 million was spent on abortion-related advertising, the vast majority by Democrats, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact.

More than 40% of all Democratic advertising was on the abortion issue, Ms. Lake notes, predicting “you’ll see more of that” going forward. “I think that there is now a recognition that the youth vote [is] our best vote” she adds. “Abortion and birth control can play a major role in energizing young voters, which will be important for us in 2024.”

Beyond ads, abortion-rights advocacy groups also tout the volunteer door-knocking, phone and text banking, and mail efforts that they say were vital to Democratic victories in key states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Those three states were the “blue wall” that Mr. Trump breached on his way to victory in 2016, and which Mr. Biden won back in 2020. 

In Michigan, Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer made abortion her No. 1 issue, and won reelection easily. Her party also took control of the state legislature, setting up total Democratic control of Michigan state government for the first time in nearly 40 years. The abortion-rights ballot measure spurred turnout, helping Democratic candidates, Professor Grossmann says. 

Likewise, in Wisconsin, the reelection of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and Republicans’ failure to win a veto-proof majority in the lower legislative chamber represent a victory for abortion rights.

Eddie Moore/The Albuquerque Journal/AP

Vice President Kamala Harris, right, along with New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, left, and Eve Espey, chairwoman of the University of New Mexico Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, talk about states where abortion rights are protected during a conversation on reproductive rights in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Oct. 25, 2022.

Vice President Kamala Harris can also be counted among the midterm winners. After the Supreme Court ruling leaked in May, she held more than 35 events with abortion-rights advocates around the country, helping to rally the Democratic base. Vice President Harris was seen by some as an especially effective voice on the issue, as women of color are disproportionately affected by the demise of Roe. 

Professor Grossmann inserts a note of caution. He agrees that the high court’s landmark ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe, gave Democrats a burst of energy. But over the course of the campaign, he notes, polls showed the issue fading, with suburban women shifting back toward Republicans over the economy and crime. 

“If the elections had been held in August, Democrats probably would have done even better,” Professor Grossmann says. 

The next cycle

Certainly by 2024, the issue landscape will have evolved. The state of the economy matters more in presidential races than in midterms, and if high inflation and other economic challenges persist when voters go to the polls, the Democrats could face stiffer headwinds. 

Some anti-abortion Republicans are also working to improve the public image of their side’s advocacy efforts. Melissa Hart, a former member of Congress from the Pittsburgh area, just joined the board of an organization called Vision for Life, which advertises the services of pregnancy care centers. Liberals often vilify such centers, saying they deceive women in crisis pregnancies to steer them away from abortion. 

“People decry pro-lifers, and say they don’t care about the baby when she’s born,” Ms. Hart says. “Pregnancy care centers do everything – medical care, clothing, diapers, finding housing. A lot of people don’t know about that.” 

News organizations are already starting to publish stories reflecting the real-life impact of the Dobbs ruling, and more are certain to follow. These could feature women in restrictive states trying to obtain an abortion; women who encounter roadblocks and end up having the baby; doctors navigating risky legal terrain. All could further influence the national debate.

Presidential candidates will also be pressed to take a clear stand on the issue. Mr. Trump, who has already declared his candidacy, now has Roe’s demise as part of his legacy, as he nominated the Supreme Court justices who provided the pivotal votes. But so far, he has not been trumpeting his role in overturning a nationwide right to abortion. 

Florida’s GOP governor, Ron DeSantis, has also kept relatively quiet on abortion. He’s fresh off a landslide reelection and, polls show, is the top potential primary opponent to Mr. Trump, yet the issue could be tricky for him. Florida already limits abortion to 15 weeks’ gestation with no exception for rape or incest, and some state Republicans now want further restrictions. Republican supermajorities in the state legislature render Democrats powerless. 

In a run for president, Governor DeSantis would need the support of a key, national Republican constituency that strongly opposes abortion to secure the GOP nomination. But if successful, he’d likely want to distance himself from hardline views to try to win the general election. 

“If Ron DeSantis moves to a more extreme position, it will damage his opportunity in 2024,” says Karen Finney, a Washington-based Democratic strategist. Congress is “highly unlikely” to pass legislation that codifies Roe, she adds, which means “the spotlight will remain in the states.” 

Simon Montlake/The Christian Science Monitor

Stephanie Woolstenhulme stands in front of a wooded site where a new well is due to be sunk to supply water to households in Oakley, Utah, Oct. 25, 2022. Utah is among the driest states in the country and has seen a population boom that is straining its water resources.

Outside Stephanie Woolstenhulme’s office window, the first snowfall of the season has dusted the streets. She looks delighted, and not just because she’s a skier. Her community needs all the precipitation it can get to replenish the springs and aquifers that water its roughly 1,600 residents. “Water is gold here,” she says.

Ever since European settlers crossed the Rockies, access to water has defined the development of the American West. Water irrigates farms, hydrates households, powers machinery. But a prolonged drought that began in 2000 has become the Southwest’s driest 22-year period in 12 centuries, according to analyses of tree-ring records.

This cycle of dryness comes amid a population boom in drought-prone states like Utah. Its residents grew by 18% to 3.25 million from 2010 to 2020, faster than any other state, even before the work-from-home trend took hold.

That migration has pushed up the price of real estate and, as elsewhere, sparked debate in Utah over housing availability and affordability for average families. But the debate is increasingly laced with other concerns: Will there be enough water for everyone? And who gets priority?

In Oakley those concerns reached a head in summer 2021. Citing low levels of water in storage tanks to fight summer fires, the city voted to suspend all water hookups to new houses. “We’ve trodden the line between being able to provide water for the citizens that live here and accommodate growth,” says Ms. Woolstenhulme, the city planner. “Then we kind of hit the line where we could no longer do that.”

The moratorium remains in place until Oakley can build a new $3.4 million well to increase its capacity. That could be a year or more away. For now, builders are either digging their own wells or getting permits to install water lines that the city has agreed to connect after the ban ends.

Conserving water, managing growth

Across the parched Southwest, forecasting how much water will be available to supply housing and other users is complicated by climate change. The 22-year drought may be a cycle that turns wetter, or a new normal that forces hard choices. Annual flows in the Colorado River, on which 40 million people depend, are already so low that Western states are being asked to do more with less of their current share. 

Some here argue that it’s time for a hard stop on breakneck development. But adaptation to a drier climate is also an option, one that Utah has belatedly begun to embrace, even as it remains a prolific user of what water it does have.

By conserving more water and charging market rates to users, say advocates, Utah could manage its growth without tapping out its resources.

“We have incentives to waste water,” says Zachary Frankel, executive director of the Utah Rivers Council, a nonprofit organization.

Those incentives help explain why cities in Utah, the second driest state after Nevada, have lush summer lawns. The state has the nation’s cheapest water rates and is among the largest municipal users per capita. It also relies on property taxes to help fund municipal utilities, which effectively gives a free ride to schools, churches, and other tax-exempt institutions. A Republican lawmaker recently proposed a tax bill that would strip water from property taxes and require all users to pay for their water.

Around 70% of water in Utah’s towns and cities goes to irrigate nonessential landscapes, such as sidewalk strips and ornamental lawns that nobody uses for picnics or playing ball. “That grass is there because we have the cheapest water in the country,” says Mr. Frankel, who supports the proposed tax bill.

Meanwhile, the Great Salt Lake, the largest lake in the United States after the Great Lakes and a feeding ground for hundreds of species of migratory birds, is rapidly shrinking. It fell last year to its lowest level since 1963, and toxic dust from its exposed bed blows across the city on windy days.

Rick Bowmer/AP/File

Rows of homes in suburban Salt Lake City, April 13, 2019. Much of the boom in Utah’s housing market is playing out in Salt Lake City and its suburbs. Before the pandemic, the average single-family home sold for under $400,000. In October, the average sale was $551,000, according to Redfin.

The lake is fed primarily by the Bear River, which snakes into northern Utah. That same river also supplies water districts near the lake that have proposed diverting more water to households and other users. Similarly, in southern Utah, where resort towns are booming, the state has proposed a controversial 140-mile pipeline from Lake Powell, which itself has shrunk so much that the project seems a nonstarter.

Joel Briscoe, a state representative in Salt Lake City who serves on the Natural Resources, Agriculture, and Environment Committee, says lawmakers in Utah have finally woken up to the stress on rivers and the need for conservation. “We’ve not been taking this seriously before,” he says.

Ripping up lawns

This year, Utah’s legislature passed bills that mandated water metering for landscaping, created a statewide turf buyback program, and set limits on turf at new state-owned buildings. It also set aside $40 million to protect the Great Salt Lake.

Mr. Briscoe, a Democrat, says he still encounters rural lawmakers who ask him why Utah can’t just build more dams and pipelines. Others object to funding programs to encourage the conversion of lawns into drought-tolerant gardens. “They tell me, ‘Nobody wants a front yard with a bunch of rocks,’” he says.

In fact, a growing number of homeowners in Utah are ripping up their lawns, says Chase Fetter, who runs a specialist landscaping company in Salt Lake City. His company replants yards with native shrubs and grass, and drought-tolerant trees, and then installs automated irrigation systems. These measures can cut outdoor water use by 75%. “People are concerned about their water use, and these yards need so much less,” he says.

Much of the boom in Utah’s housing market, and the stress on its water supplies, is playing out in Salt Lake City and its suburbs. Before the pandemic, the average single-family home sold for under $400,000. In October, the average sale was $551,000, according to Redfin.

Oakley lies over a pass in the Wasatch Mountain Range in a narrow valley hemmed in by another range. Working farms occupy part of its central core. But it is within commuting range of Salt Lake City and is a short hop to Park City, a popular ski resort. That proximity has driven up the price of its real estate.

Simon Montlake/The Christian Science Monitor

Chase Fetter, a landscaper, stands in front of a drought-resistant garden he installed at a house in Salt Lake City, Oct. 26, 2022. Mr. Fetter's company sees growing demand for conversions of lawns to native shrubs and trees that use less water.

Last year the average house in Oakley sold for $492,000, says Wade Woolstenhulme, the city’s mayor (his cousin is married to Ms. Woolstenhulme). This year the price hit $761,000. That cost reflects a paucity of starter homes: Most available houses sit on large lots. But remote working has juiced the demand to live in rural redoubts like Oakley, says Mr. Woolstenhulme.

“I can sell my house in California for $1 million and come up here and buy a really, really nice house for $750,000,” he says. “Why would you live in a smoggy city when you can do your work here?”

For now, Oakley’s moratorium on water hookups acts as a brake on development. Construction using permits issued before the ban, and remodeling using existing water lines, is continuing. But builders looking for land to subdivide are going elsewhere.

When the city announced its policy, Ms. Woolstenhulme and other officials got calls from other communities in Utah that had similar concerns and wanted to understand its legalities. So did Kay Richins, the mayor of Henefer, a town of about 800 people north of Oakley that imposed a water moratorium in 2018. He says his town will lift its ban when it completes a new well next year and that he expects a burst of activity to follow.

But he’s not sure that any new housing will serve existing residents who worry about being priced out. “I’d like our children to stay here and raise their families here,” he says.

Too many people?

Mr. Richins sees plenty of downside in Utah’s demographic boom, given the stress on water supplies. “Why do we want this [population] growth when we don’t have the water as a state? They just keep putting up apartments on every corner,” he says.

At times, the tussle over water access in Utah feels like a proxy for a broader sense of disquiet in small communities that fear being overwhelmed by newcomers – NIMBYism dressed up as water-capacity concerns. Officials in Oakley insist that they’re not trying to stop development by withholding water permits. “We did it because we were out of water for public safety. We couldn’t meet our needs,” says Mayor Woolstenhulme.

The belief that a larger population exceeds Utah’s water capacity is common, but may be misplaced, argues Mr. Frankel. He wants to see action on conservation and market-rate pricing, particularly for large users of outdoor water, not for more towns to be declared off-limits to developers. “If we can lower our water usage, we can effectively double our supply,” he says.

Before Oakley suspended hookups, it had already begun to limit outdoor water use by residents. And when the moratorium ends, the city is mulling a change so that water rates increase sharply for large users, which isn’t currently the case.

For Ms. Woolstenhulme, the challenge of managing water resources to support more sustainable growth is just getting started. “Water will always be an issue in Utah. It will. So the fact is, just because we have a new well, it does not mean that we can just use as much water as we please,” she says.

In some Phoenix neighborhoods, strolling families and dog walkers can be seen playing a game: real or fake? 

Guessing at this used to be laughably easy. Now artificial lawns are so convincing that it may take plucking and sniffing a wispy blade to discern if the lush green carpet outside a home is living flora or cunning plastic. Even dogs get confused. The snootier ones turn up their noses. 

In Los Angeles, the neighborhood game is more like an office pool, the goal of which is to guess how many months it will take homeowners who have ripped out their lawns in favor of government-subsidized native shrubs or cactus to reverse course and replant water-guzzling sod when they decide to sell or get a new cornhole set.

The stakes in such matters are far from trivial, as reflected in the yellow, orange, and dark plum shades splashed across climate maps of the United States this season – hues meant not to suggest autumn leaves but color-coding for “abnormally dry” to “extreme” and “exceptional” drought. 

Lawns have become crucibles of conscience, one more way individuals struggle to maintain a balance between freedom and responsibility in the nation’s cultural tug of wars. Even in places such as Ohio or New Hampshire, where lawns already hibernate under inches or feet of snow, a glimpse of a mower in the garage can stir traumatic memories of springtime’s judgmental stares:  

Shame on you, one scowl says, for having a weedy splotch of yellowing turf in a freedom-loving neighborhood where the conscientious sacrifice their Saturdays to crawling on hands and grass-stained knees in search of renegade dandelions.  

Shame on you, says another, for having a lawn at all, you irresponsible, climate-disrupting monster. How dare you?

Rip out the lawn was their “right thing”

Susan Denley and Bill Nottingham were motivated less by shame than a local agency’s financial incentive when they decided to rip out the lawn adorning their front yard in Los Alamitos, a Southern California suburb on the border of Orange and Los Angeles counties.

Ann Hermes/Staff

Motivated less by shame than a government subsidy, Bill Nottingham and his wife, Susan Denley, resolved earlier this year: “Let’s do the right thing and rip out the lawn.” But even after learning that the incentive they’d hoped for had expired, their resolve held.

They had bought their home in the development almost 40 years ago.

“Every house had a front yard with a lawn and trees and rose bushes,” Mr. Nottingham says. “It was ‘Leave It to Beaver,’ ‘Father Knows Best.’”

Everyone on the street seemed to tacitly accept the aesthetic.

Gradually, though, as temperatures crept up and the West’s recurring droughts drove water bills higher, their commitment to the lawn teetered. Even after learning that the incentive they’d hoped for had expired, their resolve held.

“Let’s do the right thing,” Mr. Nottingham said, “and rip out the lawn.”

Turfgrass historians – and yes, there are many scholarly tomes on the subject – trace the nation’s lust for lawns to the 18th century, when word trickled back about a landscaping trend taking root on the grounds of such enviable architectural icons as the Palace of Versailles. Soon Thomas Jefferson had a lawn planted at his Monticello estate and George Washington at Mount Vernon.

A couple of centuries later, William Levitt saw the “charm and beauty” of lawns as such a strong selling point that he wrote covenants into the deeds of his affordable and notoriously conformist Levittowns, imposing fines on homeowners who didn’t mow theirs at least once a week in season.

And that, Case Western Reserve University history professor Ted Steinberg reports in his 2006 book, “American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn,” was one more step in the “colonizing” of the nation by grass. It has become, researchers say, the most expansive irrigated crop in America, one that sprawls over more land than cotton or corn, covering tens of millions of acres of turf farms and the golf course fairways, cemeteries, parks. and, yes, front and back yards nationwide to which they cater.

Lawn supporters, including those who write the webpages for the $2 billion Scotts lawn company, will tell you that those green acres suck carbon dioxide out of the air and release oxygen, trap dust, dampen the clamor of urban life, mitigate storm runoff, prevent erosion, and cool our homes and neighborhoods. To which environmental skeptics respond, well, maybe so, but natural landscapes do a much better job of all that without squandering water and poisoning rivers, lakes, wetlands, and the ocean with herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers.

A growing body of work, with titles such as “Requiem for a Lawnmower,” pleads for, though never quite predicts, a future without lawns. 

Americans, after all, are so loyal to those comforting expanses of green that agronomists, botanists, horticulturalists, and other scientists nationwide spend entire careers, funded in part by the multibillion-dollar golf and lawn care industries, studying, breeding, and testing turf to fine-tune regionally preferred cultivars for color, durability, bug and weed resistance, and the textures so many of our bare feet or cleated shoes crave.

In search of the sustainable lawns 

On a warm autumn morning at the University of California, Riverside’s sprawling agriculture research center, researcher Jim Baird holds aloft a dirt-packed root-and-grass stolon, a horizontal runner from one of the new cultivars of grass he has been cultivating.

Ann Hermes/Staff

On the left, an artificial turf strip in Bill Nottingham and Susan Denley’s yard in suburban Los Angeles contrasts with their neighbor's drought-battered real grass on the right.

Dr. Baird, who declares his favorite color to be “green,” says he fell under the spell of well-tended turf, redolent of the outdoors and sports, in high school while working at a Colorado golf course. He picked the colleges he attended for their programs in turfgrass research and has spent the past decades teaching and researching the genetics, breeding, propagation, and care of grass.

While his peers at universities in water-rich Florida may focus on the ever-popular Kentucky bluegrass and those in Michigan or Colorado on the fescues that thrive in the midwest, Dr. Baird focuses mainly on Bermuda grass, a warm-weather cultivar that landscapers and groundskeepers have been nudging westward as the Earth heats.

Water agencies and environmental organizations “scapegoat” lawns for water shortages, Dr. Baird says. It is in the spirit of compromise that he and colleagues have crossbred recent strains, he says, to be at least a third less thirsty than the previous types of Bermuda and use more than 50% less water than cool-season grasses like the fescues, ryegrasses, bluegrasses.

“As long as there’s genetic variation,” he says, “there’s a way to make something better.”

Foolishly mention the type of turf that doesn’t need water at all and he growls, “I’m not a fan.” The fake stuff, he says, can heat up to 190 degrees on hot days – and environmentalists trot out even harsher critiques, citing microplastics leaching from the petroleum-based synthetic turf and mountains of the fabric piling up at landfills among the side effects.

Dr. Baird’s pride in his work and passion for the form and function of living lawns is so irresistible that a reporter can’t help but kick off his shoes and stroll over a patch of dewy turf, letting bare soles connect with memories of backyard tackles broken by spongy loam and the sting of wet green blades that stroke a body careering headlong off a slip and slide.

Similar memories, from the days when their children played soccer and baseball on the family’s front and back lawns, keep Mr. Nottingham from swearing under oath that he and Ms. Denley will never roll out turfgrass again.

But so far they seem proud of their role as sod-busting pioneers of a more sustainable suburbia. And so far, Mr. Nottingham says, neighbors have expressed only admiration for their new front yard of decomposed granite, river rock, olive trees, and xeriscaping – with just a fringe of artificial lawn for the sake of continuity with the neighborhood’s “Leave It to Beaver” past.  

Maine is the only place I’ve ever lived where folks spend the summer getting ready for winter: roof repairs, tuning up the snowblower, topping off the oil tank while prices are low, getting the all-important load of firewood in. It all amounts to a beehive of activity that detracts from time taken to enjoy the glories of the warmer months.

Because summer involves so much preparation for the hard months that follow, it can be a breathless ramping-up time that upends one from enjoying a day on the coast, a swim in a remote Maine lake, or a quiet lobster dinner with family and friends. 

Now consider winter: There’s no lawn to mow, no garden to tend, no wood to split. All of those chores have been done. Instead of being a ramping-up time, winter is a locking-down time. In short, winter frees us in all sorts of ways to be present for the wonder of a season that has long been synonymous with Maine.

It’s a fact that winters up here aren’t what they used to be. I once had a neighbor named Earl. An old-timer and a self-made man, he reveled in telling me stories about Maine winters of yore. He did this with a certain panache and forthrightness that suggested he had survived the ice age. I suppose he was not far from the mark, because he backed up his reminiscences with evidence: old black-and-white photographs of monumental snowstorms that piled drifts up to second-floor windows and completely buried cars. 

“Now, those were winters,” he told me.

And he was right. Those were winters. And I’ll never forget what he said as a coda to one of his stories: “A man couldn’t get much done once the snow came.”

So what did he do once the snow came? 

Well, he spent a great deal of time tending home and hearth, where he stoked the wood stove, sat with his wife, made pots of coffee, and read by the fire. 

Winter, in short, gave him pause to hunker down and heave long sighs of contentment now that the heavy lifting of summer had receded to a memory.

As I write these words I occasionally raise my head to glance out the window at the woodpile (stacked), the garden (harvested and turned), the apple tree (picked), the lawn (mowed), and the bicycle shed (newly roofed). 

Sheesh. As I tended to all those warm-weather sinecures, when did I have time to breathe? What happened to all the talk – back in June – of a relaxing summer? 

Some years ago a friend sent me a quote by Socrates that I try to be mindful of: Beware the barrenness of a busy life. I take this to mean that one should not lose sight of the moment while preparing for the future. It’s something I’ve struggled with, I must admit. 

But the counsel of the years has – and I honestly mean this – taught me to look forward to the advent of winter, because I’ve finally learned that it is a slowing-down time, a gift of repose, an opportunity to acknowledge that most of the outdoor work that could be done has been done. 

A friend of mine who lives in the Southeast recently called. In the course of our conversation he celebrated the climate where he lives, which enables him to work outside year-round. “I’m always on the go,” he told me.

That’s nothing that a good dose of winter wouldn’t fix.

Reuters

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez walks past a wall with the names of people killed by late Spanish dictator Francisco Franco's forces during the Civil War, in Valladolid, Spain, Oct. 24.

Many countries that have emerged from violent internal conflict – Colombia, South Africa, Tunisia, Cambodia, to name a few – have tried to mend their divided societies with a blend of justice and forgiveness for past atrocities. Then there is Spain. Its limited attempts to heal wounds from the Spanish Civil War have lasted nearly half a century since the end of the Francisco Franco dictatorship (1939-1975). The latest attempt is a new law, passed last month by a left-wing government, that aims to finally achieve national reconciliation.

The law would, among other things, devote state money to help families locate the remains of loved ones killed during the civil war (1936-1939). Up to now, the families have tried, with help from donors, to find an estimated 100,000 unmarked graves for people slaughtered by Franco’s nationalists. In sheer number of mass graves, Spain ranks first in Europe and third worldwide after Burundi and Cambodia, according to the United Nations.

The new official effort, said Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, will “settle the debt of gratitude that our country still owes to those who committed themselves to a democratic Spain.” Tracing the remains of anti-fascist fighters would help Spain “be at peace with its past,” as he put it.

This mix of gratitude and truth-telling about those killed would, in theory, lift a veil of silence over the war’s atrocities. School textbooks barely touch on this dark chapter of Spanish history. On Oct. 31, Spain held its first day of remembrance for Franco-era victims, part of the new law’s mandate for honoring those democratic heroes.

“If we know and understand our bad heritage, we can control it. If we don’t know it, and we don’t understand it, it’s this bad heritage that governs us,” novelist Javier Cercas told the Persuasion online publication.

Yet another view of gratitude has led to opposition to the law. Spain has enjoyed peace and prosperity, critics contend, ever since former associates of Franco joined with communists returning from exile to forgive each other in a 1977 law that set Spain on a path of democracy. The country can be grateful, they say, for a historic period of coexistence without digging up the Franco past.

“Spain has moved on by doing, by acting,” one academic told journalist Tobias Buck in a 2019 book, “After the Fall.”

The critics also say that individuals, not the state, should decide what evidence to remember about the civil war. A history imposed by a particular government is a tactic to control the present, they argue, and a denial of individual agency.

This struggle over competing views of gratitude for Spain’s democracy could be easy to solve. The new law, for example, gives high praise for the post-Franco leaders who set aside their differences to launch one of Europe’s most solid democracies. And most Spaniards support further efforts, whether private or public, to help families find the remains of Franco’s victims.

“There can be no [national] concord without memory,” states Manuel de la Rocha Rubí, a politician of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, in elDiario digital media outlet. And Spain has plenty of gratitude on both sides to finally find reconciliation.