Health knowledge made personal
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I live with a soul that soars around color. Lots and lots of color. Bold color. Aubergine and Tuscan yellow and indigo. My favorite color is, and always has been, red. And so it happened naturally that when I went to make signs for the community garden the other night, I chose bright colors I love. I crouched on the ground with brushes in hand and found myself in a state of flow, the hour or so flying by on crimson wings. And this is what resulted: The top two signs go together on a shopping cart that the manager of a nearby Kroger supermarket donated to be used at the community garden for a demonstration "Meals on Wheels" food pantry bed. It looks something like this now: The bottom sign will go on the bike trailer I'm trying to get donated so I can transport more freshly harvested food to the food pantry via bike (which seems to break down cultural barriers and build a bridge between the food pantry clients and me). Until that bike trailer magically appears, I've put the sign on my current system, which involves my two panniers: I brought the signs with me one of the three 6:30 AM mornings this week that several of us met at the garden to work on our rain garden stormwater mitigation project after a recent downpour set us back a bit. I was excited about the signs and the shopping cart and the bike. But when I showed them to a fellow board member, he said, "Ya' know, there's a fine line between whimsy and tacky." Huh? Well, yes, I know that. But my soul soars with color. And fun. And living out loud. And inviting more people into the conversation in a way that just might make a measurable difference. Seeing my perhaps-crestfallen face, he went on, "I mean, you're also talking about adding a bottle tree, and a tire planted with flowers." Well, yes, I have that bottle tree in my home garden , that nod to African folklore immortalized so beautifully in the movie based on the Newbery Award-winning book, Because of Winn Dixie, and repurposed in my yard to "catch the demons" of plastic bottles that we find discarded in our travels. I thought something like that might make a positive educational addition to the community garden, since we're a Zero Waste Zone. And, yes, my younger daughter did find that tire in the woods there and asked if we could incorporate it into the community garden somehow, and I remembered how my mom had turned a tire into a planter that looked like a bright yellow flower when I was a little girl, which I thought was nothing short of brilliant. I thought perhaps my mother and daughter could make it together and we could add it by the children's woodland trail that an Eagle Scout candidate is spearheading (complete with consideration of children with special needs). I walked away and pitched wood chips into the bright red wheelbarrow to dump into our big puddle. And I felt the soft and subtle squashing of my soul, a feeling I know intimately as I've felt it a million times before in my life. I live in a city with leaders who wanted to require bike racks on private commercial property to all be painted a standard muted color, even though the cycling expert who was championing the effort warned that that requirement would be an unnecessary impediment to businesses participating. The bike racks never happened. I live in a city that wants to extend "overlay district" architectural requirements throughout the entire city, limiting color palettes. I live in a city that almost passed an ordinance that would outlaw colored Christmas lights (I kid you not). I live in a city where at least once a year my younger daughter says to me, "Tell me again what's wrong with a yellow house or a purple business, Mom." I live where fear of what people will think trumps fun more often than anyone cares to admit. Another board member just repaired our community garden front fence. This girl was at the garden when he and another garden member were doing it. She helped. Other children in the garden at the time were thrilled with the outcome. I'm not sure how my colleague concerned about the Fine Line Between Whimsy and Tacky is going to feel about it. But I do know that, for me, one of the hardest parts of being in a community garden is finding those happy places between here and there on the idea spectrum, between acceptable and not, between whimsy and tacky, where every soul can soar. (photo used with permission of child's mother) |
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