Southerners try and compare life to all sorts of things in metaphors. Some southerners say life is just trying to get your laundry out of the washer machine and into the dryer before the mold sets in. I failed to do that this week. Who hasn’t heard of life being compared to a box of chocolates or a storm with a rainbow? My all time favorite “life quote” is that life is like a bar of soap — once you think you have gotten hold of it, it slips away.

Life is a canvas, life is a good book and life is a party.

But reporters see the world in quotes and words. As reporters interview someone on the street, whether it’s the mayor or a homeless person, they aren’t searching for the dirt or the gossip. They aren’t exactly looking for the same answers to the same questions. They are searching for beautiful language to pop off of lips and stand out among all of the boring information.

In reporting, for myself, life is like sizing up someone, expecting them to be boring, and then they shock you with their simple words of wisdom and profound meaning. This happens to me often.

To Toni Hart from Prattville, life is a lot like a gourd. She told me gourds come in all shapes and sizes and, “no two gourds are alike.”

“You see all of these spots,” she said, and pulled up one of her brown, leathery gourds that was sitting on a cowhide at the Carneal ArtsRevive building. Her booth at Streetfest was tucked away where she had a corner all to herself. She had gourds transformed into planters with cacti, tied with horsehair and decorated with carvings and buffalo teeth.

“This gourd right here was a throw away gourd. It was sitting in my throw away pile, and then after I started to look at it, I realized I had a not-so-perfect deer antler and together it just tells a story,” Hart said. “They say once you start in gourds, it just takes over your soul.”

Hart sees the beauty in the story of the gourd and wondering what each gourd must have been through in its lifetime. Once full of water, they are drained and dried out and then turned into one of her pieces of Native American art.

Hart tries not to paint over the dark spots and bruises because she said they show where the gourd has been. I have always seen gourds used as birdhouses, hanging high up on a pole, painted with a white wash to cover all of those marks she talks about.

It was great to meet someone that also finds beauty in the background, the scars and the bruises of life, because it all tells a story. No detail is too small. No scar is unimportant. Life is a lot like a gourd and journalism is a lot like turning that gourd into a cacti planter.