After nearly 30 years under the ownership of one Springfield family, the long building that houses most Kings Yard shops will be sold at auction at 4 p.m. on Friday, April 2, at the Bryan Community Center. The building houses 10 retail spaces, nine of which are currently occupied, and the sale includes an adjoining wooded property to the north behind the post office.

If Yellow Springs has lost a significant number of jobs in the past 15 years, it follows that villagers have lost employment opportunities, which has a visible effect on an already minority African-American population. There are fewer African Americans employed in the village now than there were 30 years ago, and though there have never been a lot of African Americans who own and operate businesses in town, the current number appears to be lower than ever.

When the sky turns a steely grey and snow starts sheeting down, many residents run for their hearths and accept that they’re at the mercy of the white burial. But Village crew members head straight at the snow, outfitting themselves with plows and backhoes to wrangle up some order, at least in the streets. The eight members of the Village street and electric crews have done quite a bit of wrangling this month since the winter’s two biggest snowstorms dropped nearly 20 inches of snow on the village.

For many years after her death in 2002, the glass door to Virginia Hamilton’s writing office remained closed. Every day Arnold Adoff, her husband and writing partner, passed the office at their home in Yellow Springs, but he didn’t want to open it. Then in 2007 fellow children’s book writer Kacy Cook helped crack the vault, and out poured 35 years of research, notes, speeches and manuscripts that formed the gritty trail of an American intellectual and her life as mother, wife and prolific writer.

Tied with Emmanuel Christian for number one in the Metro Buckeye Conference and holding up a 12–2 record three-fourths of the way through the season, this year’s Yellow Springs High School boys varsity basketball team has raised eyebrows. Having steadily improved their record each year since suffering a 3–16 season in 2007, the Bulldogs are charging into tournament time with ambitious sights set on state.

When Isabel Newman graduated from Bryan High School in 1943, Antioch Bookplate President Ernest Morgan hired her to work for the company. Soon after, he sent her to a six-week course at the Mergenthaler linotype school in New York, and upon her return, she worked for the company for over 40 years, retiring as a manager. At that company, whose president actively promoted racial integration, she recalled that typically a fourth of the employees were minorities. The support for a racially diverse staff appeared to be the same at Vernay Laboratories, where two of Newman’s sisters worked, Yellow Springs Instruments and Antioch College, the place that bred all three companies and their socially minded leaders.

The Village of Yellow Springs is considering a plan to create a new entrance off Dayton-Yellow Springs Road directly into the Center for Business and Education (CBE), the new business park created by Community Resources on the west edge of the village. Though the authority to approve the intersection rests with the Greene County Engineer, Village Council will discuss the proposal when the park, which was annexed into the village in 2005, comes up for approval as a subdivision later this year.

Before the earthquake, Haiti was a country that struggled to support human life. Haiti was already the poorest country in the Americas by most standards; 80 percent of the people lived in poverty and many of those were malnourished or infected with AIDS or other diseases. And in the capital city of Port-au-Prince, about 400,000 people lived in the squalor of a lowland trash dump besieged with standing water, through which rag-clad children would dig for their daily sustenance.

For at least one Yellow Springs homeowner, the past year has been unforgettable. In the fall of 2008, his mortgage company granted him a three-month forbearance on the monthly payments for his home in the village. Having no steady income due to an ongoing health issue, the homeowner received a second forbearance in early 2009, and then was told in the spring that unless he could begin making his monthly $1,000 mortgage payments, the lender would begin foreclosure proceedings on his house.

From the middle of a field, the land looks different than the view from the road. Seen from the land owner’s perspective, the way the growers see it, one can just begin to understand what the birds and foxes see — open space without borders. That is also perhaps the way that painters and poets see the land when they articulate why it is so loved and valued.