People passing through Yancey Mills on Hillsboro Road are sure to see Harry: In fact, more than a few people drive by specifically to see him, especially as the seasons change. It’s hot now, so Harry hangs around the back yard in his swimsuit and beach accessories, including the floaties that he might need should he take a swim. Unfortunately, the scanty attire draws attention to Harry’s lack of muscle tone.
No need to worry. It’s natural that Harry has no muscles, nor fat, nor even skin. He’s a skeleton, his 12-foot length propped up in the yard of Jessie Mustian. As you might have guessed, Mustian is a fan of Halloween.
She’s actually more than a fan, Mustian said: “I’m a huge Halloween fanatic.” For her birthday in October 2020, she had just moved to her home in Yancey Mills, a home she has come to love, not only because of the area’s natural beauty, but because of her neighbors, who turned out to be a lively, imaginative, close-knit group of friends who cheer for Harry’s seasonal outfit changes and are the living invitees to an annual Halloween party at the Mustian household.
“When I was about to celebrate my birthday that year, these 12-foot skeletons had just come on the market,” Mustian remembers. “I told everyone who would listen that this would be the ideal birthday present for me.” Privately, she had little hope of becoming a proud skeleton owner. “They were expensive, and they were an immediate hit, selling out everywhere,” she said. Somehow, family and friends found Harry, chipped in to buy him, and surprised Mustian on her early-October birthday.
It seemed a shame to relegate the bony bon vivant to storage after just a few days in the spotlight, so Mustian decided to keep him as a permanent fixture whose outfit signals an upcoming cause for celebration, whether Christmas, Easter, St. Patrick’s Day, or a welcome change of seasons.
So far, passersby have received Harry as a light-hearted welcome to the neighborhood rather than a ghoulish reminder of the impermanence of the human body. Mustian and Harry get letters and postcards from strangers thanking them for the display and encouraging them in their efforts to bring a smile to the faces of people they don’t even know. “Light and joy,” Mustian said: “that’s what we were after.”
Mustian’s talent for entertaining and bringing people together is more than you would expect of an amateur. She’s actually a professional, having just accepted a job directing activities at the Sentara Martha Jefferson Community Health and Outreach Center in Charlottesville.
The Plant Doctor
Across the road, Mustian’s neighbor, Katie Kempson, has amassed a huge array of plants that, like Harry, attract attention in this interesting neighborhood. Although she undeniably has a green thumb, Kempson did not buy them or even plant them. “All of them were brought to me because they were struggling for life,” she said. Kempson, AKA “the plant doctor,” has several strategies for nursing sick flowers, succulents, shrubs and house plants back to health. First, she checks the soil––“if they’re from around here, it’s probably clay,” she noted––then she mixes up a vitamin-rich potion that almost inevitably promotes healing. “Some of them have been over-watered, and some under-watered,” she said. After monitoring the water intake, Kempson carefully checks the plants over time.
Kempson started out providing a bit of a plant ICU for plants from a couple of friends; word got out and she became overrun with her vastly improved patients. “Ideally, I’d nurse them back to health and the owners would come and pick them up,” she said. In reality, many of the plant owners are convinced that their plants would once again suffer under their care, or they forget, or they move away, leaving the plant doctor with a huge number of now-healthy plants. Many of them can be seen from the road growing and thriving as a great counterpoint to Harry’s all-too-dead affect.
Like Mustian, Kempson is no hobbyist, but a serious, credentialed professional. She has a master’s degree in landscape architecture from Virginia Tech. She moved to Crozet to oversee the median plantings in Old Trail and has gone on to direct the landscaping at Crozet Mini-Storage for Creation Appreciation, an Afton firm. The lush vegetation at her home pales in comparison to the thousands of ground cover plants, 91 trees and 454 shrubs she’s planting to soften the new construction.
News You Can Use
Continue east on Hillsboro and you’ll come to another imaginative structure, this one conceived and maintained by Suzanna Hornsby. Hornsby moved to Crozet in 2001 because of good memories of her years living in the then much smaller Crozet community as a student at UVa. “I’ve seen Crozet grow,” she said, “and it seemed as though as we attracted more people, we actually got farther apart.”
That feeling increased during the isolation of the pandemic, and started Hornsby thinking about how people gathered local information before the popularity of social media: “They’d go to the town square,” she said, “or hear talk among neighbors.”
She mentioned the Crozet Gazette: “We all love it,” she said, “but since it comes out monthly, I wanted a way to alert people to happenings in the neighborhood and beyond day to day.” She had a good connection with the schools through her daughter, a student at Brownsville, and thought the schools could also benefit from public reminders of upcoming events.
She hit upon the idea of a sign that could be seen from the road, and started scouring Facebook Marketplace for a suitable model. Sure enough, she located a large sign that came with all the letters she’d need to make frequent changes.
To enable people to find out a little more about the basic postings, a friend made her a vinyl QR code that people could scan to get the rest of the story. Since then, the neighborhood has been alerted to upcoming elections, birthdays, patriotic events, ways to support local nonprofits, even the approach of the full moon.
Rain or shine, Hornsby fulfills her mission, changing the sign by hand whenever needed. When she’s out there braving the elements, people often stop and thank her for the community service.
Like her neighbors, she knows more than a little about how to accomplish her goals. She’s a professional public relations specialist, a talent that shows in her wonderful website, crozetnewzyoucanuse.com. That’s where you’ll find the way to announce your event or personal milestone to everyone who travels along Hillsboro Road.
The three neighbors each have their own way of presenting their interests to those who roll through Yancey Mills, but they share the same mission (in Hornsby’s words): “Connecting the community, one drive-by at a time.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.crozetgazette.com ’
