The Year in Kudzu

Here at the end of the year I'd like to reflect for a few hundred words about time and then make some judgments about a few Spartanburg developments that have passed over the rim of eternity in the last calendar year. After all, it's late December, the last month of twelve in the great annual cycle.

What good does it do to look back? Isn't it better to push forward, to carry on? Aren't we creatures who are drunk on progress? Isn't the past simply that: the past? I have a favorite quotation and I trot it out way too often. I do that because it's so meaningful for me. It's a line from one of William Faulkner's novels. Faulkner has his narrator say (and I paraphrase) the past isn't dead, and sometimes it isn't even past.

What I've always imagined the great Southern novelist meant by this line is that we can get off course in a hurry if we buy too quickly into the idea that whatever happened behind us (in the past) is just that-behind us, over, finished.

Time's a lot trickier than that. Our job as conscious humans is to deal with the complexity of it. Literature, as Faulkner showed, is one of the best ways to sort through time. A novel is a great time machine, as are songs, plays, poems, personal essays. Point of view and tense make great tools for exploring past, present, even future. Writing the past is one way of settling it.

Each year I sit down on New Year's Eve and list the top stories in my life for the proceeding year. I write these stories in my journal where I can go back decades and read a sort of chronicle of my life. It's a way of summing up, of accounting, of making passing time concrete, of settling the departure of twelve months. Once a year I pull together honors, surprises, accomplishments, disappointments, and losses. Some years it's easy to compile the list. Other years there's more than I can account for in a few brief entries.

Now that the last burnt ends of 2006 are smoldering, it's time to look back and remember a few of the best and worst developments in Spartanburg County this year. Here are a few:

~Downtown Pride. 2006 saw new life continue to flow into urban core of Spartanburg with completion this year of Morgan Square. There was a major planning project completed, and a dozen construction projects downtown are underway.

~Community-Building Philanthropy. Mary Black Foundation's $550,000 grant to the Palmetto Conservation Foundation for the Glendale Project began the rebirth of the neglected historic village at the end of Country Club Road. Hopes are now high for the community and its stunning location on the shoals of Lawson's Fork Creek.

~County Woes. As much as many of us would like to, let us not forget that 2006 was the year Spartanburg Council County nearly voted to build a regional landfill near Cross Anchor before the deal with Waste Management finally collapsed in a mysterious smelly heap. And how could we forget that toward the end of the year the lack of the county's land use planning and regulation erupted into a border war with North Carolina over a high-density condo development in hunt country north of Landrum? And let us not forget that newly elected council member, O'Neal Mintz's company ended the year under fire for buying stolen copper and facing a law suit and probe by DHEC for violating environmental regulations. And then if these Council's woes were not enough, Greenville County Council voted in December to add two cents to its hospitality tax for parks and green space. This makes Spartanburg look reactionary and short-sighted for considering selling off potential regional park land it purchased a few years ago.

~SPACE and the South Carolina Conservation Bank. This year the Spartanburg Area Conservancy was able to tap successfully into state conservation money to add important acreage to the Edwin Griffin Preserve on Spartanburg's east side. Land preservation is always good news, especially in a county where sprawl threatens so much of our landscape.

~The Music Trail. This year local nonprofits were successful with several benefit concerts in establishing a fund for honoring local musicians with plaques on a future "walk of fame" downtown.

Well, there are a few from me. I'm ready to put this year to bed. You add your own civic surprises and disappointments to the list. Sit down and do the same this year with your life. Faulkner would be proud.