Art ball is landlocked buoy

Maybe you saw, as you drove down Maple Avenue last month, an Alexander Calder-like array of giant ornaments spinning on arms held in place by a giant magnet on a giant metal ball in a small front yard two houses south of the old Hedlin ballfield.

That was the holiday version of Chris McCarthy’s garden buoy, which she decorates about 10 times a year.

McCarthy got the ball-shaped buoy at an estate sale 15 years ago. “I knew I was going to roll it into the front yard and paint ‘Go Braves’ on it, because my son, Patrick Layfield, was on the football team then,” she recalled.

Mounted on a hydraulic mining nozzle, the buoy is easy to spot. McCarthy and her family and friends change its look depending on seasons, current events or their whims.

Through words and images it has welcomed Canoe Journey participants, cheered on the Seahawks and commemorated missing indigenous women. In April it’s often covered in tulips. In the summer, vegetables.

When it said “Lutefisk Nation,” McCarthy opened her curtains to discover a family taking its picture around the buoy. “Walk and chew gum” was another message.

While she tries not to be too political, McCarthy does introduce “small but not divisive subjects” now and then – like the word “persist” or the plaintive “25 miles an hour”.

This Christmas her husband, Tim Layfield, painted the globe red and stenciled on a gold star. To construct the mobile, he drew on his background in shipbuilding.

“We were amazed that the magnet held those balls on.” she said. “They spun around but never broke, even in the snow.”

McCarthy decorates the ball in broad daylight, but says most people don’t notice her at work. The temperature has to be above 40 degrees for the paint to stick. And it can’t be raining, which is why the buoy gets more paint coats in the summer.

McCarthy has her fans. “Lots of people wave and once a nice elderly man quite literally drove into my yard to tell me how much he has enjoyed it.”

She calls painting and repainting the buoy “endless fun”.

“You never know what’s going to go up,” she said. “It cheers people up and it’s given me as much as it has done for anybody else.”