Summertime, and the driving is easy, so let up on the pedal, roll down the windows and take a look at how the residents in the area have expressed their inner Picasso.In Woodmen Hills, a giant bronze pig commands the yard of Bill and Marie Stogner.”My wife collects pigs,” Stogner said. “It was a gift from a good friend of ours.”Although the pig has been in the Stogners’ yard for just a few years, it’s already taken a trip. A year or two ago, a few high school kids moved it to a sheriff deputy’s yard, Stogner said. Future trips are unlikely. “It’s fairly heavy, but now I’ve got it chained down,” he said.On Bradshaw Road in Peyton, Bill Curns turned his mailbox into a piece of art.”I’ll bet it’s been 18 or 20 years since I made it from stuff that was laying around the yard. I figured it might make a good mailbox,” Curns said. “It kind of gives if the snow plow hits it, but it’s heavy enough metal. It ain’t going nowhere.”Just a few miles away, on Peyton Highway, there’s a tea pot atop every fence post in front of Jody Heffner’s house.”My wife and I were driving around in Canon City and saw this property with little tea and coffee pots on the fence line, and I thought, ‘how cool,'” Heffner said. “We’ve been collecting unusual coffee and tea pots as we go along. I go to Goodwill and places like that, but I don’t spend more than $5 on any one.”He plans to change out the current collection with more colorful pots he’s recently collected.Punsters will appreciate the bedposts that Heffner’s wife placed at the front and back of a flowerbed. “We have a bathtub in our front yard that we’re going to make into a fountain. Use the things you have, rather than buying stuff,” Heffner said.That’s exactly what Katy Jensen did for her boyfriend’s grandparents, George and Betty Evanoika, who also live on Peyton Highway.”I saw that George had a brand [at the entrance to his ranch] and I liked it,” Jensen said. “At the time, I was living in Nebraska, taking a sculpture class at college, and I was into welding.”Jensen said she found the parts for the sculpture in the Evanoikas’ scrap pile and took them back to Nebraska, where, using her dad’s welder, she put them together in the shape of the Evanoika brand.”I painted it and brought it back out to Colorado two years ago,” said Jensen, who has graduated from college and now works as an office assistant for a local company.Closer to Falcon, two mailboxes on Curtis Road have been given major makeovers: one features a Saguaro cactus, and the second, right next door, has been transformed into a hot rod engine.Their owners could not be reached for comment, but they deserve recognition for their creativity.That concludes the tour of local ingenuity.More yard art? Let the NFH know – send an e-mail.
