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You’re not a “yard sign person.”
You had some friends who were passionate about stuff in college, and sometimes you sort of nodded along, but you’ve tended to find that sort of thing embarrassingly earnest at best and cringey at worst. You prefer to keep your opinions to yourself – not just out of politeness, but because you’re from Massachusetts and you pride yourself on giving as little information to the enemy as possible. That means no turn signals, no acknowledgment of strangers’ existence outside of a terse nod, and no yard signs.
But a good friend asked you to put the sign in the yard. They’ve asked casually before and you’ve always said you’d rather not, but this time they gave you a little more background on why they felt it was so important. You’re still wary of getting into the messiness of town politics. But this is a good friend, and you can tell this is really important to them. So, somewhat reluctantly, you say yes.
And then one day the sign just appears, sprouting from your winter-ravaged grass like a rectangular dandelion – just some colorful corrugated plastic on a wiry metal frame. You glance at it through the curtains, shake your head and chuckle. You intend to forget about it.
But as you drive through town, you find yourself noticing all the signs. You don’t count them, but you get a sense of how many there are like yours, and how many not. And as with a sports team, you begin to feel a tiny twinge of positive energy when you see a sign like yours.
One day you hear about a bomb threat at the public library. The social media-obsessed folks in town go nuts, but you wait for the facts. The police confirm a bomb threat was called in to the library just before a gay pride story-time event. It turned out to be a hoax, but if it had been real…part of you still wants to shrug it off, but you can’t. Was this sort of thing really happening in your town?
Curious now, you look a bit more into the candidates. You read letters to the editor, and find out that the two candidates have quite different opinions on many things, especially in regards to the public library having LGBTQ+-friendly books. You’re pleasantly surprised to find that your sign – a blue one that says “Tara for Select Board” – represents someone who strongly supports LGBTQ+ rights and the public library itself.
One stormy day, you come home from work to find the sign missing. You find it stuck in some bushes down the street, one of its metal legs snapped clean off. As you trudge back in the rain, you wonder why you ever agreed to this.
And yet, you find yourself carefully planting the sign again, jury-rigging a solution around the broken leg. You don’t put it back where it was, but try to choose just the right spot so it’s most visible from the street. As you do so, you’re very aware of the cars driving past, of the neighbors you imagine are watching through the curtains, amused at your earnestness. And maybe that’s what worried you – caring, and people knowing you cared. Your friend’s earnestness made you uncomfortable because it represented a vulnerability, a willingness to admit they had a stake in something.
You take a step back to admire your handiwork, and in that moment, you understand: this matters to you now. But that doesn’t make you a “yard sign person.” It just means you care. About your neighbors, about your friends, about your town. And as all those other signs around town show, you’re not the only one.
Jason Clarke
Ash St.
