We’re spending three months this winter in a mobile home community in Florida. We’ve left a cold and beautiful place, trading the sights and sounds of home for a single-wide trailer with a Florida room. I’ll miss one of my favorite sounds of winter – how the trees crack during the below-zero days and nights, which is a dramatic reminder that trees have lives of their own.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the need for self-expression. Some think this is the province of writers, artists, performers; that the “ordinary” person need not apply. Most people ascribe to that point of view – that it’s the “job” of artists to express themselves, and they don’t necessarily notice their own self-expression as just that. One of the reasons I’ve been thinking about this is because I’ve been noticing the way that people decorate their houses and front yards using ordinary things like plastic or stone animals, flowers and plants, specific colors, plywood cutouts of people and the like. Things that are produced in mass, for mass consumption. What’s unique, though, is the way these things are combined. Here are three examples: the first, a lovely pink tower made from vases, plates and a teapot; an arrangement of farm animals in a window planter and a house with orange trim which is quite striking and cheerful and fits into this community in a way that it would not in most neighborhoods, developments and gated communities. These things and others like them around this community or arrangements in front yards glimpsed as I drive by are heartening to me. They spark my curiosity about the decorators – how they chose the objects, how they combined the objects, what of themselves they’re trying to express.