Hope Shows Up on Branch Street: Rocky Mount NC

I watch a lot of the videos of lawn clean-ups and repost some on my Main Street Facebook page. With the right equipment, one or more people find a neglected, overgrown yard and offer, for free, to reclaim the property.

The results are always remarkable. In a matter of hours the transformation lifts more than just the yard. It lifts the house, the neighbors, and the whole feeling of the street. These small acts of care delight me.

I discovered Branch Street much the same way, simply driving around several years ago. I consequently wrote a Main Street blogs about what I found. It has photographs that don’t need words. Click on https://mainstreetrockymount.com/2023/01/05/rocky-mount-nc-councilman-joyners-ward-3-the-shame-of-branch-street/

There are parts of Rocky Mount you come across that make you slow the car. Branch Street was one of those places for me. The block looked tired. Litter had collected along the curb. Some windows were boarded. It had the unmistakable look of a place that slipped away without notice or attention.

I have learned from watching lawn clean-up videos, neglect has covered up what still matters. When cleaned up, there is still a sidewalk, a driveway, a house, and the possibility of a new lease on life.

As I write about what happened on Branch Street, an old story floated into my mind, one I had not thought about in years. It was the novel Lost Horizon, the book that introduced readers to the hidden valley called Shangri-La.

In that story, while the outside world grows increasingly troubled and chaotic, a small valley survives because the people living there preserve what is good. They care for beauty. They maintain order.

They hold onto the belief that the things worth saving are worth tending.

The message that stayed with readers for generations is a simple one. Even when the world looks broken, there are places where people are preserving hope and beauty.

On Branch Street on Saturday, something like that happened.

A group of volunteers showed up with tools, gloves, trash bags, and the simple determination to care. Litter disappeared. Vines choking out vegetation, invasive ivy, were removed.

In a few hours the block these volunteers were working on changed, because they picked up the first piece of trash and decided the street was still worth caring for.

Hope arrives this way. A few people, on an ordinary day, deciding a forgotten street should not stay forgotten.

Crystal Wimes-Anderson, helped bring these wonderful volunteers, including children, and Trail Life Troop NC0834 from First Baptist Church Rocky Mount to help in this Community Clean up as their monthly service project. What a great choice.

What stays with me were the children working alongside the adults, picking up trash, carrying bags, and seeing with their own eyes how a place can change when people decide it matters.

I doubt a single one of them will ever toss trash from a car window. They have now seen the other side of that choice.

This is the hidden magic of days like this. A lesson is planted. If Rocky Mount’s neglected neighborhoods are to rise again, the prescription is what occurred on Branch Street. A few leaders, neighbors young and old together made things happen for themselves.

That’s what made me think of the hidden valley from Lost Horizon, a place where people decide that beauty and care still matter.

When I write Mainstreetrockymount.com it has a way of stirring old memories, or lines of a song, and long-forgotten ideas like Lost Horizon. Recovering these bits and pieces that have relevance today brings me great joy.

It begins with a street, a photograph, or a small event in town, and it reminds me that hope has always begun this way, with people deciding that a place is still worth saving.