It's 9AM
I think they’re brown eyed susans, she said.
We took an exit off the Interstate and stopped at the bottom of the ramp to turn left.
The median next to me was filled with yellow flowers waving in the wind of the cars and trucks passing a couple dozen yards away.
I wasn’t sure what they were called.
Brown eye daisies, brown eye Susan’s, or even some Latin name I’ve heard once in a class and forgot to remember.
Pretty, especially for the location.
The dark side of a highway exit shaded in perpetual shadow.
Which proves the point you can find beauty in even the most desolate places.
Maybe that’s why I like the idea of restoring Pine Bluff so much.
That and reading about people who buy ghost towns and turn them around.
And my hometown is nothing if not a ghost town.
Populated and peopled by memories of places gone and people from a past that disappeared.
We dream of a future that’s hard to make and a past that really never was, and ignore the present.
A good thing in this particular instance, because the press has not been kind to the Bluff.
But then, neither have all the folks who post on the Facebook Groups about things that once were and might have been.
They left.
I left.
We left, and what we left behind was population decline and industries scrambling for workers.
Easy to blame Bill Clinton and NAFTA and manufacturing facilities dropping below the border for cheap labor.
But part of the problem was us.
We got gone and in the getting gone, we drained the brain pool.
I know because I was friends with a lot of the best and brightest, and they went for big schools and big adventures and what ended up being big careers, and did not carry those careers back home.
I can place a number on the population decline and I can place a dollar sign next to what businesses were lost.
Harder to calculate the cost of the bad headlines and bad press, except to talk about the mountains it created in an attempt to build it back.
If it’s even possible.
Except…
Someone planted those pretty yellow flowers next to the overpass beside the Interstate.
Maybe the DOT which I like to vilify.
They saw a plot of dirt and thin grass and weeds and instead of considering it a collection plate for litter and debris, they decided to spread some seed and hope for the best.
They got a field full of wildflowers.
Not a big field, and not much variety, but a pretty sight to behold.
And hope.
PB has 500 vacant lots because the Urban Renewal Agency tore down 500 dilapidated and derelict homes.
My Papaw’s place is one that’s on the list to be bulldozed, or at least what’s left of what he built after someone burned it down.
Those empty houses hosted crime and despair, and now the empty lots host weeds and liens.
What if someone went through and scattered a bunch of wildflower seeds across the lot of lots?
500 lots of pretty wild flowers.
It might not bring back business.
It probably wouldn’t bring back people.
But to the people who are still in town, wouldn’t it be a nice little something for them to look at?
And wonder what they were called?
Do you have a pretty memory that sticks?
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New Witch on the Block: A Paranormal Women's Fiction Novel (Midlife in Mosswood Book 1)
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Tornado Warning: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (The Damaged Climate Series Book 1)
Surviving The Evacuation, Book 2: Wasteland
It takes more than people to rebuild a town. It takes community.
Now we have to brainstorm how to rebuild that community, that sense of belonging that unites people and makes them willing to be more than their individual selves.
I understand and feel the pain of a City that has potential but just can not get over the pasts past, Ft Smith is a similar situation not quite but similar, the way I see things are that people have a tendency to get in there own way, we stand back and wait for government to fix things and never take the time to get involved and fix it ourselves, past city officials in Ft Smith were never proactive enough when jobs left now they are way behind the curve.
I grew up in Ft Smith left it 40 years ago for the gold of NW AR. and never looked back, I still have family in Ft Smith and every time I venture down the mountain I see the potential but realize the selfishness of people and the lack of public pride that was once a staple of out environment.
Now Ft Smith did not receive the bad post that PB has over the years but the politics were about the same mentality when jobs and factories left for greener Mexico they stood back and watch and thought that if they stood back and did nothing if would be alright and it wasn't, now the once second largest city in AR is now 2nd to Fayetteville.
PB has always gotten a bad rap on everything from crime to jobs, but I can see the potential in both cities if the right people cared enough to get involved, now it is a fact that PB and Ft Smith neither have the Waltons, Tyson's and Hunts but their is money in both places if the people with the money cared enough.
Sorry for the Rant, have a good 4th from NWA