It is the time of the year when Rotary members gather around the Rotary fountain in downtown Ironton to clean up.

“Today, Rotarians are freshening up the Rotary fountain space,” said Sarah Simmons, the Ironton Rotary Club president. “It’s been here for decades and there are some bushes that are starting to look a little scraggly.”

So, out came the bushes.

“We are going to replace them with some native flowers,” she said.

Simmons said that the work on Thursday and Friday was part of their clean up ahead of the annual Ironton-Lawrence County Memorial Day parade, which kicks off at 10 a.m. in downtown Ironton on May 26.

“We want the city looking tip top,” Simmons said. The big cleanup was on Friday and on Wednesday “we are doing our part to do the heavy lifting and hopefully, when we are done it will look beautiful.”

The Rotarians do this cleanup every spring and it never gets easier.

“If we have a lot of volunteers it only takes a couple of hours,” Simmons said, adding that part of the job on Thursday was moving some flowers.

“We are separating the lilies,” she said. “They have decades of growth and we are going to separate them and put some in the beds by the Lawrence-Scioto Solid Waste District office, we are expanding our garden space a bit.”

Simmons said she was enjoying it since she wasn’t in her office at Ohio University Southern where she is a communication and external relations manager.

“I get to get out here and dig in the dirt, I don’t get my hands too dirty sitting behind the computer,” she said. “And I used to work in landscaping so this is really fun for me.