Come on, you grumps of Springfield —
it’s time to quit complaining and get seeds in the ground.
There’s a movement afoot to make this a better place, one
yard at a time. The idea is that every seed plants hope, every
plant adds life and beauty, and every planter becomes part of the
civic solution. Ask not how your city can grow for you but what you
can grow for your city.
The movement is called the Yard to Yard
Challenge, the latest project of Springfield Green, a community
volunteer initiative.
“It’s as simple as looking
outside your front door and seeing what you’d like to
change,” says Sharon Whalen, publisher of Illinois Times, one of the
Y2Y sponsors, along with Illinois National Bank and Ace Hardware.
Elsewhere in this issue, and at www.illinoistimes.com, are details
on how to enter the contest (before June 1) and compete for prizes of as much as $400 in
various categories. This is a friendly competition, but that’s
not the main point.
“It’s not about the
competition,” Whalen says. “It’s about trying to
get grassroots support for beautification. We’re all
responsible for how our city looks.” Once you enter,
you’ll get a Yard to Yard yard sign to show your support for
the campaign.
Most entrants are sprucing up their own
properties; one is offering to plant for a shut-in who can’t.
Several downtown businesses have committed to improving the
landscaping outside their stores. Groups are invited to green up a
school or a house of worship. I can picture a neighborhood
association picking out the ugliest vacant lot on the block to
become a community garden. Or how about organizing a group to clean
up the yard of an abandoned house? Maybe that will give someone the
idea to fix it up rather than tear it down. If we planted flowers
up and down our alleys, we’d keep the trash picked up and the
weeds mowed down.
I cherish a 1989 letter from my father, now deceased, on why he liked to grow vegetables.
“I get lots of pleasure giving away the excess, which is most of
it, to my less gifted or lazier friends,” was one of the reasons
— classic Fletcher. Another reason was simply “It gives me
a sense of accomplishment to put things in the ground, nurture them,
and watch them grow.”
My dad was never vocal about his faith, but
he closed his letter by naming what motivates many gardeners.
“Whether it be vegetables or flowers or whatever, the growing
process strengthens one’s belief that there is surely a God
up there that lets all this happen.” We grow things because we know it’s not us
doing the growing.
The Yard to Yard movement is catching on, and
every one of those green yard signs makes someone curious enough to
ask how to get one. Growing things have a way of spreading. Soon
this town will come alive with energy, and we’ll start
talking about how to get things done rather than about why we
can’t. It doesn’t have to be hard.
In his poem “On the Building of
Springfield,” Vachel Lindsay acknowledged that we need many
of the Lincoln-hearted to do their work: “A city is not
builded in a day.”
But it’s not all work, Lindsay said.
Here’s the kicker: “Some city on the breast of
Illinois/No wiser and no better at the start,/By faith shall rise
redeemed — by faith shall rise/Bearing the western glory in
her heart.”
Let’s get planting.
For questions about Y2Y, send e-mail to yardtoyardchallenge@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in May 5-11, 2005.
