Signs of the Times: Do Yard Signs Make a Difference?

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In the 11 years that I’ve lived across the street from John and Carey, I’ve not known them to showcase their preferences or opinions with yard signs, unlike many in our liberal, activist, urban neighborhood. So I took note when a Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library sign went up in their front yard — an innocuous enough message, in a neighborhood with two colleges and at least one Little Free Library on every block. And I paid even more attention at the blue and white reminder for traffic to slow down on the side street that we share in our corner houses.

“I feel it’s some kind of miracle that a serious accident has not occurred at our intersection,” Carey told me, citing that as the reason why she got the “20 Is Plenty” sign, which the City of Minneapolis began distributing in 2020, when it lowered its speed limit to 25 miles per hour. (St. Paul began offering free signs to residents earlier this year.) The library sign was a gift to donors, she recalls.

The absence of political signs in their yard on a well-traveled corner is no accident. “We haven’t put up political signs for years,” Carey says. “Personally, I don’t think seeing a campaign sign in someone’s yard would ever influence me to vote for that candidate.”

Her stance is at the heart of my own household’s disagreement about political yard signs. My husband, David, thinks they’re a distraction and a blight. America “fought for the secret ballot for a reason,” he says, and it’s nobody’s business how we vote. I counter that when ill-informed voters fail to recognize all the names on their ballots, I want my candidate’s moniker top of mind: “Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of that one.”

I didn’t have yard signs at the house where we raised our sons in Northfield because I had visible jobs — editor of the twice-weekly local newspaper, later director of communications for one of the town’s two private liberal arts colleges — and expressing my viewpoints publicly would have been inappropriate (and unethical as a journalist).

Later, when we moved to St. Paul, I hesitated to display my liberal leanings because of my position as director of neighborhood relations for the state’s largest private college, a Catholic institution. Many students and neighbors knew where I lived, five blocks east of the campus’ northern edge. An “All Are Welcome Here” sign by my own Little Free Library seemed harmless enough, but I waited to plant the pro-choice UnRestrict Minnesota sign in my front yard until I had left the university in September 2022. Having been reported to the general counsel’s office for my activism with Planned Parenthood North Central States, I prioritized job security and bided my time.

Freedom of speech

Signs, flags, bumper stickers: They can serve as advertisements, virtue signaling, rebellions against the establishment or just plain fun.

I laughed out loud when I first saw an “Any Functioning Adult” yard sign in Minneapolis during the 2020 presidential race. More recently, during another heated presidential campaign, I smiled at a yard sign in Grand Rapids, Minnesota to elect a family pet amid the battling Harris-Walz and Trump-Vance signs.

As seen in Minneapolis.
Having fun Up North.

For others in my neighborhood, yard signs are both joyful expressions and serious business. Jamie, the husband and father in the family next door, has printed anti-Project 2025 signs for his yard (and mine) and was among the first on our block to put a Black Lives Matter stake in the ground. “I believe yard and window signs express my beliefs and values,” he says, “especially related to landmark and once-in-a-lifetime cultural change issues like gay marriage or systemic racial injustice.”

Jamie also has printed a T-shirt that he wears when he waves pro-democracy signs with other activists on a busy street corner once a week: “People of quality are not threated by people seeking Equality,” the T-shirt reads.

Two hand-made porch signs at my next-door neighbors’ home.

His wife says the handmade signs in their porch windows were a creative outlet for the oldest of their three children during the early days of COVID and in the explosive aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd. “Signs serve as an entry point to launching a discussion about a difficult or controversial subject,” she says, “and hopefully help others consider opposing views as less threatening.”

Another nearby neighbor — the only Republican I know on the block — put out a Nikki Haley sign back when the presidential candidate was still standing up to Donald Trump. I asked him about it one morning as we were dumping our recycling in the alley bins. He looked wary at first but later explained his motivation in an email.

Credit: Parker Johnson, Unsplash

“I thought she was the most qualified person in the race at the time, and I wanted to show my support and get others to notice,” he told me. “This is the first time I’ve put up a sign in more than 15 years. Nikki was the only presidential candidate I’ve been excited about in many, many years.”

Power and privilege

The Reverend Kelli Clement, a Unitarian Universalist minister, puts up signs in the front yard of her house in south Minneapolis “without worrying too much,” she says. Many of her neighbors share her views, and she works inside an institution that aligns with her values.

She describes both of those circumstances as a privilege:

  • Freedom from fear that a progressive sign would get “shot up or stolen,” which has happened to people she knows in small-town Wisconsin and other rural areas.
  • Freedom from worry that the UU congregation she serves would reprimand or discipline her for voicing opinions that run contrary to church teachings.

The UU “values of justice, equity and inclusivity are my values,” Kelli says. She can’t imagine wanting to post a yard sign that runs contrary to those. Plus, “nonprofit leaders and religious folk are individuals in their own right,” she declares. “We don’t owe our civic opinion to our place of employment.”

For Joan, whom I met through community and political organizing, yard signs are a catalyst to explore and confirm her beliefs. They help her step beyond what’s comfortable “and proclaim a position and values.” Which can be hard, she says, “if you believe you are in the minority.”

I am at an age and stage where I no longer have to appease an employer — a time of life when I am developing what I consider a healthy disregard for whether people approve of me. At 67, after decades of working hard and playing by the rules, I feel I have earned the right to be forthright and frank, so long as I don’t disrespect others. My yard signs may mean little to neighbors or passerby, but for me they represent a visible, colorful, even audacious symbol of being true to myself.

Ready or not: Here comes retirement!

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It happened gradually, and it happened overnight. Over the course of two years — and then seemingly without warning — I have become ready, finally, to embrace retirement. Not to cease being physically active (ever!) or contributing as a volunteer. Not even to give up my quarter-time gig as an editor and nurturer of younger writers.

Instead, after more than 40 years of seeking identity and purpose and meaning through work, I have stopped defining myself as a careerist. As “what I do.” The question to answer now is: Who am I?

“Seasons change, people grow together and apart, life moves on. You will be OK, embrace it.”

— “Words From a Wanderer,” by Alexandra Elle

When I left full-time work in September 2022, at age 65, I would visibly stiffen whenever people asked me about “retirement.” Indeed, I defiantly declared in a blog post that my two part-time jobs qualified me as working — still in the game! —  especially since the positions utilized my skills and had professional sounding titles, which felt important to me then. I also defined retirement, in part, as the decision to draw Social Security, and I aimed to avoid that until I hit my full retirement age of 66 years and 6 months.

Fast-forward to today:

  • I left one of my two part-time gigs in early June, the one that paid better but was more chaotic and uncertain.
  • I opted to begin drawing Social Security when I turned 67, on July 4, and will receive my first check in August.
  • I have become more particular about the freelance work I will accept, turning down a potential offer that would have paid well for at least a year but had aspects that run counter to my values.

Back in February, I woke up earlier than usual on the morning I was set to give notice at my second job. As I sipped my café au lait before sunrise, I listened to a podcast about emotional intelligence in retirement. The speakers urged listeners to name their feelings and even state them aloud, like a 6-year-old: I feel sad. No, not that. I found a letter from the Social Security Administration in a neglected pile of mail, and I recognized a different feeling: I feel scared.

As well as humbled, helpless, hopeful. What comes next?

Where do aging people find community?

Twice last week, on consecutive days, I had rich conversations with women about loneliness and the meaning of friendship, about where we seek and find community now that our networks are shrinking, and our family responsibilities — whether raising children or caring for aging parents — are largely done.

One talk was with my widowed sister, who hasn’t worked in years (the workplace being a hub of socializing and people contact) and who recently moved from her familiar neighborhood. She plays Mahjong with her former neighbors and recently joined a cards group. That squares with advice in a New York Times article back in May, which cited research showing that adults on either end of the age spectrum may be vulnerable to loneliness — and can offset it by volunteering and joining groups.

My second discussion was with a longtime friend who is planning to retire early next year. I told her about the “Women in Retirement” group I had visited recently after months of finding excuses not to go. “The women all looked so old when I walked in,” I said, and then we laughed, knowing full well that the image I carry of myself in my head is not the one that looks back at me in photographs.

Starting from young adulthood, self-reported loneliness tends to decline as people approach midlife only to rise again after the age of 60.

— “The Loneliness Curve,” New York Times, May 21, 2024

Both conversations revolved around the gap between our own perceptions of our energy and vitality — the contributions we still hope to make in the world — and the diminishing way that people perceive us, if they think of us at all. My sister’s young adult grandkids see her as “an old lady,” she says, and rarely are in touch. My friend and I, who met 40 years ago in a newsroom, discussed the coming loss of a collegial community at work, even in a part-time job like mine.

Friendship was the topic at the “Women in Retirement” group last week, with a focus on the axiom that we have friends for a reason, friends for a season and friends for life (credit a poem by Brian A. “Drew” Chalker). My small coterie of friends for life — the handful of people who know me as myself, not within a role or professional position — are friends I made back in my 20s and 30s.

Am I still capable of forging and investing in such deep and trusting friendships, or has it become easier to blanket myself in the comfort of people I’ve known for years? Time will tell; and time, I now recognize, in one of aging’s many insights, is an ever-diminishing commodity.

How do we reconcile our shifting energies?

During the four decades when I worked full time, full-bore — setting the “gold standard” for work ethic, one of my managers used to say — I had a standard answer when people asked where I was going on vacation: “Off the clock.” I’ve lived by a calendar and to-do lists for so long that I don’t know how else to operate. The part-time job, the one or two freelance gigs I always have going, the uptick in volunteering: All add up to days that feel nearly as full as the 50-hours-a-week career.

But guess what? It’s catching up to me. At 67, I no longer can summon the energy of a 45-year-old. So: Why do I still take so much pride in staying busy? I hear my late mother posing a question that annoyed me at the time: “You’re always running, Amy. What are you running from, I wonder.” Some part is habit. Some is trying to remain relevant (as though a person my age can do that in our ageist society). Some is denial. An even bigger part is fear.

Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash

Professor and historian Heather Cox Richardson recently observed that “democracy is a process, and it’s never finished.” I feel the same way about retirement. To concede that my work life — and productivity, as I’ve defined it — is behind me, to accept that family, friends and volunteering are what can bring me peace and purpose, is to take a giant leap into the unknown.

“There is always something truly restorative, really, finally comforting, in learning what is true. In coming to the end of an illusion, a false hope,” wrote Sue Miller in her 1995 novel “The Distinguished Guest,” which I just finished. If I sit still long enough, I can name the illusion, even as I wince at its futility and hubris — the conceit that I could outrun and outwit age.

Boomers Can Help Biden By Speaking Up About the Realities of Aging

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My then–eight-day illness coincided with President Joe Biden’s stricken performance at the first presidential debate on June 27; and so, I have been thinking about age and the limits it imposes on our energies; and how long it takes some of us to acknowledge its real impacts, as though we might have prevented our physical decline and mental slowdown. As though we are at fault.

Let’s begin with the obvious: The debate’s 9 p.m. start time in the president’s time zone is when most old people (including me) get ready for bed. He was tired! I’ve since heard that Biden had a cold that Thursday night, which explains the weak, scratchy voice. (Or was that the excuse the campaign invented?) Regardless, if Biden felt half as compromised as I have with my upper respiratory infection — when I have misspelled “horseradish” on the grocery list, run over a curb on a day when I had no business driving, repeatedly emailed “Christy” at work when I meant to send messages to “Crystal,” and committed any number of verbal gaffes with my antibiotics-addled brain — then I’d be willing to give the president a pass on his poor performance.

But I don’t think physical exhaustion explains it, unless you acknowledge it as a natural consequence of his age. That’s the conversation that anxious Democrats seem reluctant to have. Joe Biden is old. We don’t have to hide it, mock it or try to explain it away. When performing without the benefit of a teleprompter, or the psychological comfort of his team of aides, Biden acted like what he is — an 81-year-old man who is decades past his prime. And who should not be running for the most rigorous, visible and consequential job in the world.

I doubt whether Biden can be convinced to pass the baton less than two months before the Democratic convention, though the next-day New York Times column by his friend Tom Friedman made an eloquent and compassionate case for why that decision would serve the country. “[T]ime has finally caught up with him,” Friedman wrote. “And that was painfully and inescapably obvious on Thursday.”

Asked to bet today, I’d predict we are careening toward a second Trump presidency, which will be a disaster for the environment, for women’s reproductive rights, for immigrant protections, for an independent judiciary, for public-school funding and so much more. Perhaps, in the meantime, we can salvage a graceful exit for Joe Biden by ceasing to slap our foreheads and exclaim about his perfectly normal signs of aging: the shuffling gait, the search for words, the raspy voice, the stooped posture. All of which I remember from my own father’s decline, a man who, like Biden himself, had once been a sharp-minded attorney and politician, too.

As I stare down turning 67 on July 4, I am mindful that we can best locate empathy when we have experienced another person’s plight ourselves. It’s no surprise that I felt nothing but sadness for Joe Biden, who is nearly 15 years my senior, as he lumbered and stumbled onstage. I saw in him a quality that, until recently, I’ve been unwilling to see within myself — a refusal to concede to age, to recognize when it is time to step back and clear the path for younger people.

My upper respiratory infection hung on for 10 days and took two different prescriptions to kick because I had spent weeks performing like I was 20 years younger than I am. Having assured my retired husband I would scale back my work commitments this year, I instead stubbornly hung on to my two part-time jobs while taking on freelance assignments and contract work that I was afraid to turn down — all at a pace I once readily sustained. Mix too little sleep and too much multitasking with generalized stress, and you eventually get sick.

And if you’re old, you take a long time to get well.

I’ve since quit one of the part-time jobs and am scheduling my freelance work more carefully. But more than once during this extended illness, I have remarked to my husband that I tire more easily, that I must start prioritizing rest. “If that’s aging in a healthy 67-year-old,” I’d say, “how does an 81-year-old president do it?” Those comments now seem prescient, post-debate.

Neither my husband nor I is a huge Biden fan, but we are staunch Democrats and we’re afraid of Donald Trump. We’ll vote for Biden if he stays in the race and are trying to convince our Socialist older son that he should care enough to vote at all. The broader realization, however, is that we aging Boomers lack humility. We’ve been in charge for so long, during such a pivotal time in U.S. history — a period that I now recognize to be an anomaly of liberalism in a self-interested, deeply conservative country — that we can’t see our limitations and step off the stage.

We wouldn’t be in this position now if the Democratic National Committee had built a bench back when Biden was billing himself as a “transition” president, the only one who could defeat Trump in 2020. We wouldn’t be here if he had made more use of a Black female vice president whom, it appears now, he picked for show and to appease a constituency he couldn’t afford to alienate.

But here we are. The commentators who call for this clearly exhausted president to get on his feet again, prizefighter-style, to schedule interviews “in unfriendly places” and to forcefully compete are themselves still in denial. They’re asking him to summon a level of energy that most 81-year-olds cannot muster, let alone keep up between now and November.

Being this sick for this long, I have been forced to cancel appointments, to read and nap, to recognize that my body no longer will allow me to push at the edges of my energy. I can still contribute, but it’s going to have to be in different ways. Biden’s greatest gift to the country, to his family and to himself would be to make way for a successor and offer himself as the advisor and elder statesman that he deserves to be.

Some question whether the president, from his seat at the pinnacle of power, is capable of that level of self-awareness. “What was the combination of moral conviction, personal confidence and selfishness that propelled Biden, despite the risks, toward his decision to seek another term?” asked columnist David Ignatius in a Washington Post commentary that my sister shared with me the day after the debate.

To say that Biden no longer is up to the job is neither to blame him nor to deny the achievements of his administration. In fact, it is ageism — a perverse sort of shame — to avoid citing his diminishing capabilities. We aging Boomers must speak publicly about the realities we are experiencing as we grow old. Only then can we demystify and make peace with this most natural, and inevitable, of life’s progressions.