"Who doesn't love a free
yard sign?" the email wanted to know.
I don't love yard signs. It never occurred to me that yard
signs were lovable. If the yard sign is for a yard sale, I'm interested, but hardly in
love.
When I grew up, the only yard signs I saw were crosses burned into lawns, and those are fairly
unlovable symbols of hate. Where I grew up, near the alphabet agencies, people didn't advertise their affiliations
for fear of losing employment opportunities. We
handed over cash rather than write checks to political parties, we quietly marched off and voted
on the appropriate days, and rarely discussed national politics in groups of
more than three. "Who doesn't love a free yard sign" tells me more about
the age of the writer than it does about the candidate they want me
to volunteer to help.
Some yards are veritable thickets of names, supporting every candidate from president to city council. Some yards sport a new biblical quotation each week. Some advertise
niche festivals, love for a specific breed of dog, the fact that a child has
graduated from high school, joined the Marines or has a birthday. Every contractor who works on a house, from roofing to installing vinyl flooring, wants to put out a yard sign. Houses for sale have additional yard signs
proclaiming open houses on Sundays. What
this really means is that traffic will be very slow because cars will line both
sides of the street, which is not really able to accommodate 3 lanes.
Yard signs are like Facebook. People can't take time for
personal interaction, so they put up yard signs, some of which are 6 feet tall
and have guy wires on each side. They're
like small scale billboards, and they stay up for MONTHS. You know the ones, they're printed in red on screaming yellow plastic and they have streamers at first, until ripped of by the wind or children.
The wire frame from the yard sign has its uses. Several of
them support chicken wire to protect a garden from grabby pests. A single one
supports bloom-heavy flowering plants. When imagination fails, the frames can go in the recycling bin.
