Jo Myers-Walker lives and works in an old bank building in Gilbert, Iowa. She has a shop where she sells her watercolors, brightly colored sculptures, ceramics, and multimedia pieces. The mother of four grown children, Myers-Walker supported herself and her kids as a working artist for decades, through two marriages and long periods of single mamadom. It’s sometimes a hard scrape life—she once bartered art for her youngest daughter’s orthodontic work—but she’s proud to have made it work.
“People come to my shop and find out I live here, too, and say, ‘You’re living your dream!’” she says. “You can tell from their voice that they haven’t been able to live theirs.”
Part of Jo’s dream was being home and available to her kids when they were small. About six years ago, that way of life came full circle when her parents, whose health was beginning to fail, returned to Iowa from their retirement home in Arizona in order for her to help care for them. They moved into an assisted living home, and Jo visited once or twice a day. But she wanted to include them in her work and get them out of the quiet setting of the home.
She converted a shed into a woodworking studio for her dad, who had been a longtime woodworker, painting the outside pink so that it looked Provençal. “He’d arrive in the morning and work on the lathe,” she says. Jo sold his pieces in the shop and also to the wholesalers who purchase her work for regional galleries. When he became too weak to build pieces, Jo bought old furniture for him to refurbish, and sold those in the shop, too.
Many days, Jo’s mother, Josephine, greeted visitors to the shop. “We like to pretend up here,” she laughingly explains of the whimsy she encourages in her studio-shop, where she also teaches classes. “Mother wore a purple boa to greet customers. People loved it. Many of them had older parents, and they understood.”
Iowa has the largest population of people over eighty, so Jo has seen many residents from Gilbert and nearby Boone—the town in which grew up and where her dad ran the local dairy—enter their final years. At sixty-three, she has many friends who are dealing with elderly parents. When it was clear that her parents needed extra attention and that she’d be their primary care taker, she conscientiously decided to do things differently.
