The Front Yard Gallery

Storm clouds, stubbornness, and a very Polk County pivot

May 30, 2026

The plan was Mulberry Jams.

The reality was a fully loaded U-Haul sitting in my driveway while I stood inside my house changing clothes and discovering, approximately two hours before I was supposed to leave, that the entire event had been canceled. I was furious.

Mulberry Jams was supposed to be another stop on the Florida Field Guide tour funded through the Polk Arts and Culture Alliance Arts & Culture Impact Grant. I had already rented the truck. I had already spent the time building the gallery inside it. Everything was packed. I was basically at the point of grabbing my keys and walking out the door when I happened to check my email and saw the cancellation notice. The weather had turned.

To be fair, the organizers made the right call. Mulberry got hit with some nasty storms that evening, and once I saw what actually rolled through, I had no argument with the decision itself. But at the time? I was butt hurt.

There is a lot of frustration involved in losing an event after all the work and money have already been spent. Had the cancellation come that morning, I would have been disappointed. Two hours before the event, after the truck was rented, built, packed, and ready to roll, it felt like setting cash on fire in the driveway.

I was also irritated with myself. The event was scheduled for the last Friday in May, and I know Central Florida weather. I have lived here my entire life. I know what happens once summer starts settling in. The later you get into the season, the less seriously you should treat any outdoor plan that depends on a thunderstorm behaving itself. I knew better.

And there I was anyway, paying for three days of a U-Haul I suddenly had nowhere to take.

The cancellation also put another piece of the grant tour back in my head. I still needed a Lake Hamilton stop, and the event I had been considering there was the town's Fourth of July celebration...July...In Central Florida...Outside...Clearly, my weather strategy was excellent.

I went to bed Friday night feeling like I had backed myself into a stupid corner. Then Saturday morning I decided I was done being mad about it.

Fine. I had already paid for the truck. I had already built the gallery. I had already loaded the artwork. So I set the whole thing up in my front yard. Not a scaled-down version. Not a sad little consolation setup. The whole thing. I put up the A-frame signs. I hung the banners on the truck. I installed the accessibility signs on the ramp. Inside, I set up the desk, the print bins, the lights, the hanging artwork, everything. If I was going to have an art gallery in my yard, I was going to have an art gallery in my yard.

Then I got on Facebook. I posted the event. I texted friends and family. I messaged neighbors. I tagged people I knew around Lake Hamilton. I reached out to the Lake Hamilton Women's Club. I put it in the local neighborhood groups. Basically:

Hey, everybody. That U-Haul you have been watching me drag home for months? Come see what the heck I've been doing with it.

And people came.

This requires a little explanation about my neighborhood. I live in a small Polk County community where people look out for one another. That is the polite Southern terminology. We are extremely aware of what everyone else is doing. There is not a lot of turnover in my neighborhood. People know which cars belong in which driveways. They know who normally has company and who does not. They notice when something changes.

So when I started renting a U-Haul several times a month, people had questions. The first time one appeared in my driveway, I started getting messages almost immediately. Are y'all moving? Are you selling the house? Where are you going?

We had only lived there about five years, which apparently was nowhere near long enough to earn permission to leave without neighborhood consultation. Then the U-Haul kept coming back. And disappearing. And coming back again.

Sometimes I had to drive it down to the Women's Club property just to install the large exterior banners because my yard is too uneven to safely use ladders beside the truck. Then I would bring it home, build the interior gallery, load everything, take it somewhere, unload it, dismantle it, and return the truck.

My neighbors had been watching this operation for months. They knew I disappeared into my studio for long stretches. Many of them knew I was an artist in the broadest sense. Most of them had absolutely no idea what I was doing in there. Some did not know I had written books. Most had barely seen my artwork. They just knew Amanda periodically vanished into the studio and a U-Haul kept appearing in the driveway.

So when I finally said, "Come see the mobile art gallery," curiosity did a tremendous amount of my advertising for me. People showed up. Neighbors came over. Friends came. People bought artwork. People who could not make it wanted photographs afterward because they were annoyed that they had missed their opportunity to finally inspect the mysterious truck.

It became this accidental neighborhood open house for my entire professional life. Here is the artwork. Here are the books. Here is the Florida Field Guide. Here is why I keep renting that truck. Here is what I have been doing while you all wondered where Amanda went.

And because the universe has a sense of humor, the weather was terrible. Of course it was. Storms rolled through during the day. People arrived carrying umbrellas. Rain came down hard enough at times that we could not keep the back of the gallery open. But this is where the U-Haul revealed one of its greatest advantages over a traditional art-show tent.

You close the door. That's it. Artwork protected. Lights still work. Fans still work. Everybody inside is dry. Wait fifteen minutes. Open the gallery again. At one point, a few neighbors ended up trapped inside with me while a storm passed. There are worse things.

What would probably have been a quick walk through the gallery turned into a much longer conversation. We sat around inside the truck talking about the artwork, the neighborhood, the tour, the project, whatever came up while we waited for the rain to move on. The weather that had wrecked my plans the night before was now forcing people to stay longer. I appreciate irony.

A few collectors from Winter Haven even drove over specifically to see the gallery because they had missed it when I took it to the Seven Rivers Water Festival. So this thing I had thought of Friday night as a complete loss suddenly had neighbors wandering through, collectors driving over, books being discovered, artwork being purchased, and people sitting inside the truck waiting out thunderstorms.

It was absurd. It was also working. The whole day gave me one of those rare moments when frustration turns almost completely into triumph. Friday night, I had been staring at a wasted rental bill and beating myself up for planning an outdoor event in Florida at the beginning of summer. By Saturday afternoon, I felt brilliant!

Not because setting up a U-Haul in your yard is some revolutionary business strategy. Because I had refused to let the problem decide the outcome. Mulberry Jams had been canceled. Okay. I could not control the storm. I could not control when the organizers made the call. I could not recover the time I had already spent loading the truck. But I still controlled what I did next. So I moved the event. To my house.

There is something deeply satisfying about finding the dumb, practical solution sitting directly in front of you. And, as it turned out, I needed the Lake Hamilton stop anyway. The Fourth of July event I had been considering later in the summer? Rained out. Of course it was. Which meant the accidental gallery in my front yard ultimately became my Lake Hamilton stop for the grant. Problem solved.

I think there is a tendency in business to make adaptability sound very sophisticated. We call it strategic agility. We talk about contingency planning. We build flowcharts. Sometimes adaptability is just standing in your driveway staring at a U-Haul and saying: "Well, hell. I already paid for it. Set it up." That is a form of business strategy I understand. It is also a very Polk County approach to a problem.

Here, we work with what we have. We get sweaty. We get rained on. We figure it out. And if the storm traps everybody inside the art gallery, we sit down and talk until it passes. The weather won Friday night. It did not win the weekend.

I am a swamp girl from Polk County.

A little rain is not enough to keep me down. I'm not afraid of sweat or hard work. And I have enough redneck ingenuity to get around just about anything in my way.