By Debra McCown
Reporter / Bristol Herald Courier
Published: June 2, 2009

My daughter’s new favorite song is “Ring Around the Rosy,” and she never tires of swinging around in a circle, then falling down, laughing and rolling around in the grass. You could get dizzy just watching her.

On Memorial Day, she led me all the way down to the end of the dead-end, where we spun around and fell down until the tall grass was just a silhouette against the clouded evening sky.

It’s good to see the grass already head-high and know, after three years of drought, that from the look of things Southwest Virginia’s cows are going to eat good this year.

And it’s good to reflect on the resilience of humanity. Take that rhyme, for instance. It’s common belief – though Snopes.com says it’s all a bunch of hooey – that “Ring Around the Rosy” originated during the Middle Ages and described the symptoms and mass-death that came with the plague.

Whether or not the song originated during the deadly 14th century pandemic, the connection real or imagined to that time of suffering is a stark contrast to its current state of laughter, to that part of humanity that, despite our troubles, lets us roll around in the grass laughing until the sun is gone.