It's Busy Being Green

I am now possibly the busiest I have been in my whole life. No scratch the possibly. Make that definitely. It's been a lot of fun. Sometimes it seems that the more you do, the more you can do. That's a paraphrase of a popular quote I've seen attributed to a half dozen people. I tracked it down and it turns out it's Lucille Ball who said it. What she really said is, "If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it. The more things you do, the more you can do." Pretty smart. I guess she just played the ditzy lady on TV.

It is so true. I've been amazed at what I've been able to accomplish lately. On top of getting the kids back into the swing of school, volunteering there, firing up the real estate career and taking 2 real estate classes and the children's book illustration projects I have going, I've been taking and have just completed my C3 (Chicago Conservation Corps) Leadership training.

I'll miss seeing all those motivated people every week. I made a lot of good connections. Some of them will last for years, I'm sure -- but now that I have a little more time, will I lose the fire? Could the drive to get things done go out? That training took up most of every Saturday for 5 weeks, so it's possible that I'll have a lot more time now, but then, I have a project to start.

I have about a dozen I'd like to take on, but I'm having trouble deciding where to start. I thought I'd take a look at what some of the other C3 leaders are up to. So today, just 24 hours after completing my training, I took some time to stop by a river restoration site. It was a spontaneous thing. I was driving my kids home from their gymnastics class. I'd taken a different route and found myself sitting at a stoplight at Damen and Berteau. As I sat there idling, I looked up at the street sign and remembered what my C3 classmate Graham had talked about as his project: a river beautification that included reintroduction of native plants. Graham had said that the site was already beautiful, so without a word to my kids, I turned left and drove to the river.

They we're a bit confused when I pulled them out of the car in unfamiliar territory saying, "Let's go explore!" But that's the kind of direction kids particularly like getting from their parents, so just a few questions and a lot of forward motion followed. That in itself is a beautiful thing, and it complimented the ever more beautiful scene we enjoyed as we drew closer to the river. Little songbirds flitted between the fading flowers. We saw splashes of color here and there among the green and brown of the fall flowers and grasses, beautiful textures of myriad seedheads, colorful beetles hanging out on milkweed pods before we even got to the river's edge. On the water we saw a dozen mallards quacking loudly at a group of people who were canoeing our way, hound dog in the prow howling her joy at being out in the "wild." We worked our way up toward Montrose along tree lined, wood chipped paths with rustic little handmade fences, saw people walking their dogs and a young couple just out enjoying the scene. We had a terrific time and we didn't have to drive for an hour to see it either.

And isn't that one example of what's so great about Chicago? We have a great city here. Green it. Explore it. I can help.