BRATTLEBORO — Whether Mother Nature turns a cold shoulder or buries us in blankets of white, Mother Nurture is there to greet our children and gently guide them into the prevailing winterscape to play and explore outdoors.
She has patiently, persistently coped with the fickle temperaments of Mother Nature and raised a generation of schoolchildren to embrace winter no matter what the weather.
Through this millennium and a year of the previous one, Linda “Mother Nurture” Bailey has overseen the Brattleboro Outing Club's Winter Experience program and led Windham County school groups over hill and dale on foot, ski, and snowshoe to discover for themselves what winter offers. She is steadfast in her resolve to beckon kids outside to delight in being active and robust in health.
In recognition of her decades of volunteer service to our community's children, the Fit & Healthy Kids Coalition recently honored Bailey as its Community Champion for the winter season.
Since making Brattleboro her home in 1991, Bailey has made time to nurture a healthy community. Weathering her first winters in Brattleboro, Linda helped her husband, Edwin DeBruijn, in managing the Brattleboro Outing Club (BOC) Ski Hut.
When DeBruijn was out grooming the ski trails, Bailey would often bake Dutch Raisin Bread and ladle up cups of steaming vegetable soup for chilled skiers as she stoked the wood stove and tended the warming hut.
During the Winter of 1995, just a week before the birth of her first child, Truuske, a very pregnant Bailey was out - appropriately clad - enjoying the brisk, crisp morning air; timing the Washington's Birthday Cross Country Ski Race.
Through her child-rearing years, Bailey served as a parent volunteer in the classroom and on field trips with Green Street School. Every fall, she provided support logistics for kids' soccer. Every winter, she helped steer the Outing Club's various activities to expose more citizens to the joys of being outdoors through the cool months.
In spring, Bailey and DeBruijn, as proprietors of Holland's Bloom, their garden and landscaping business, donate expertise, labor, and plantings to the school community garden so that young gardeners can tend to it and see it flourish.
For seven years, as an Environmental Learning for The Future (ELF) volunteer, Bailey led young students on monthly expeditions outdoors to learn lessons in natural science and discover the wonders of Mother Nature.
This winter at the BOC, six schools send students weekly to ski and snowshoe, to traverse the tracked trails and make tracks of their own through open, untamed terrain while being shepherded by BOC volunteers that Bailey trains.
Though the decades, Bailey still finds the intrinsic motivation to stay with it.
“The chief reason that the Outing Club has been able to weather the vicissitudes of recent winters and continue to provide skiing in our community's backyard is Linda Bailey,” long-time Winter Program Director Hank Lange said. “Linda is the heart and soul of our winter program. It is her deep sense of personal commitment and caring that sparks the rest of us, despite the challenges of climate change and cultural trends, to roll up our shirt sleeves and do what needs to be done to keep the Ski Hut going.”
Bailey has been volunteer coordinator and head instructor for the Outing Club's Winter Experience program since 1999. Still, she finds it fun to guide the beginning skiers and nurture their skills as they navigate new terrain. Frequently, they flail, stumble and tumble into the snow. Whether they laugh it off or vent in frustration, Bailey is there to encourage them to pick themselves up, brush off the snow, and venture on.
In her spare time, Bailey helps tend the gardens for those more aged at The Gathering Place and Thompson House so that our community's most senior citizens can continue to enjoy nature's gifts of each season close by.
When asked why she does it and gives so much of her time, Bailey replies, “It does good to help people appreciate where they live and try to help make it a better place so they will want to take care of it.” As an afterthought, she adds about herself, “Besides, I don't sit well!”
Like Mother Nature, it seems that Mother Nurture is indefatigable.