Today when I came across an article about the "Flower Ladies" of Chapel Hill posted by The North Carolina Collection at the UNC Library today, I cried.
I went to live in Chapel Hill for the first time in the late 60s. i truly loved the "flower ladies," as did everyone i knew. Chapel Hill was still in the hands of citizens and leaders who were committed to preserving its Village character and flavor. It's as though the loss of the flower ladies was the first of the mortal blows to the charming village that I loved so dearly and almost do not recognize today The changes are far from what I could call progress. I always thought that a person must really know they are old when they come to see just about all change as decline, and the timing of my sorrow does nothing to argue against that explanation. But I honestly reject that notion.
I went to live in Chapel Hill for the first time in the late 60s. i truly loved the "flower ladies," as did everyone i knew. Chapel Hill was still in the hands of citizens and leaders who were committed to preserving its Village character and flavor. It's as though the loss of the flower ladies was the first of the mortal blows to the charming village that I loved so dearly and almost do not recognize today The changes are far from what I could call progress. I always thought that a person must really know they are old when they come to see just about all change as decline, and the timing of my sorrow does nothing to argue against that explanation. But I honestly reject that notion.
What we have lost since the Revolution of 1980 was our best and most beautiful, The world we built from FDR, and that was way before my time, to RWR was a heyday, a constant struggle but a struggle for the Good and Beautiful: a strong middle class, the expansion of rights and opportunity and equality, mom and pop businesses, the beginning of the meaning of Earth Day, people who knew a difference between fact and opinion.
Of course there were bad and negative things, but as MLK said, "“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Now, I wonder. Was the 20th century just a blip, a passing fantasy? And God, how I miss the Flower Ladies of Franklin Street.
