The heady holiday feeling is fading and heads are turning to a fresh new year. School starts back up again Wednesday. And Thursday, students and staff of Sandy Hook Elementary School return to school for the first time since December 14 shooting.

The students will return to a newly rebuilt school in Monroe, Connecticut, six miles away from the Newton, Conn. building where the shootings took place.

During this past Winter Solstice, Chuck Stead, environmental educator with Cornell University Cooperative Extension and Ramapo College, led a gathering at the Ramapo Saltbox Solstice fire caldron in prayer and song for the victims of the Sandy Hook. Stead has been a driving force behind Ford remediation efforts in Torne Valley, as well as in the restoration of the Saltbox house.

Stead recalled the words of his Antioch advisor Alesia Maltz, who called the place in the foothills of Torne Mountain around the Saltbox  “a healing place.”

“At Winter Solstice, it is traditional to send one’s prayer to the four winds,” Stead said. “So, the impromptu ceremony seemed fitting at this time of season. The service involved a reading of each victim’s name and their respective age. Once each was read, it was dropped into the cauldron fire to send our prayers on the four winds. This is a form of traditional solstice ceremony which we modified in order to accommodate the need for some sense of recovery. Once the names were all read, we sang Amazing Grace to the accompaniment of dulcimer.”

A large group turned out for the Saltbox Solstice, including Suffern Mayor Dagan Lacorte.

Under Stead’s guidance, the Ramapo Saltbox project has grown apace, reconstructing an old saltbox house that at one time stood in Ramapo Hamlet, the old work camp for the Ramapo Iron Works, located through the woods along the Ramapo River. Stead completed the reconstruction with help from Ramapo College undergrad interns, Rockland BOCES high school students who use the project as part of a job/skills program, as well as visiting groups of students, including the Antioch School of Environmental Studies in New Hampshire, and the Americorp program.

The saltbox style house will now be a museum, classroom and research center. Support and partial funding for the project comes directly from the Town of Ramapo’s Cultural Property Management department, headed up by Tom Sullivan. The department oversees historical properties throughout Ramapo, including Harmony Hall in Sloatsburg, Henry Varnum Poor House (of Standard & Poor fame), the Smith Family Farm, and Mobray-Clarke House.

“This sense of focusing on recovery is what the Saltbox Environmental Research Center is all about,” Stead said. “The folks who come to volunteer with the building, to study the ecosystem, to document the Ford paint sludge, to share their own story of recovery, bring a little piece of their lives to the center and from that we build outward.”

Photos courtesy of Geoff Welch.