In a tiny green bungalow, behind a cherry red door, lives Jo Chung, a lifelong wanderer who’s found her perfect home in Fort Smith, Arkansas. On early mornings she watches the new day arrive through her casement window, just steps from her bed. Which is steps from her kitchen, and steps from her bathroom, laundry room, storage. The entire house covers 414 square feet.
From her vantage point, Jo can see the yard she’s created, all 7,000 square feet of it. Although yard is hardly the right word. Park is a better description, with its tea garden complete with a table Jo built, fountains, statuary, a bench she repurposed from an old headboard, and a flamboyance of plastic flamingos standing in a bank of ivy.
A little bungalow. A big yard. An anomaly created when the site’s main house burned more than a decade ago. What was left was a separate garage, which was renovated into a living space. Jo bought the property in 2023.
Jo gets up at six o’clock in the morning and spends long days working outside. The first thing she tackled after moving was clearing the overgrowth. She later distributed eighty-eight bags of mulch. By herself. And that was just the beginning.
As we walk the curving path that anchors the space, Jo says, “I always wanted a park.” She says it as easily as someone else might say, “I always wanted a porch swing.”
We stop at a large tree. On the section of branches where leaves refuse to grow, Jo has attached red Christmas ornaments alongside crimson, doll-sized birdhouses. From the sidewalk, the tree appears as if it’s filled with Japanese lanterns. Jo started the project at Christmastime, loved the way it looked, and decided not to take the decorations down.
Today, Jo is wearing a red and white dress, pink sneakers, with gray socks that reach her ankles. Her soft brown hair is in curls that frame her face, and she wears red rhinestone earrings. Guessing her age would be a fool’s errand; she looks nowhere near her seventy-three years.
Jo points to a birdbath made from an old iron wash stand she painted red, then fitted with a shallow bowl. Not far away stands a metal bottle tree, with colored glass bottles. Bottle trees are traditional in the American South, once believed to capture evil spirits.
Fifty-six evergreens stand like soldiers along the perimeter of the property. There are red roses, and pale-yellow roses, coral bells, fruit trees, and herbs. A camellia that blooms winter through spring. Hostas, waterfall hydrangeas, and moss thrive in the shadier spots. Oval beds, encased by metal landscape edging, showcase more displays of flowers and bushes.
Jo’s currently working on a pathway made from brown and green beer bottle bottoms she slices with her wet tile saw. She positions the cut portion of the bottle into the ground, making geometric patterns with the colors. Jo struck a deal with a local bar owner to take the bottles off her hands. Jo insists she didn’t drink the beer but explains there is one visitor who might dispute that.
“I had a huge pile of beer bottles, and I had a delivery guy come up to leave a package at the door,” Jo says and laughs. “I watched him move the package from the door to the beer bottles and take a picture. I was so embarrassed.”
Just then, a fox squirrel scampers by, startled when it spots Jo’s two small dogs, Bob 2.0 and Stella. No worries, though. The docile dogs have their eyes trained on Jo.
When the tour is over, we retrace our steps, stopping by the tiny headstone of Bob 1.0, a Jack Russell terrier who lived a very good life. We go inside. Jo is a minimalist. “I have one small plate and one big plate, one set of silverware,” she says. She gave TV up thirty-five years ago.
The walls are rich green in places, with gold wallpaper in others, its pattern filled with white flowers, green trees, and exotic birds in a palette that includes gray and black, orange and dusty ruby. Art fills the walls, and there are surprises everywhere, like the bird figure that sits on a beam near the ceiling.
Jo grew up with five brothers in Kansas City, Missouri. Her father worked for the railroad, and her brothers were her closest friends. Her mother was a highly intelligent person. A woman who encouraged her children to use their imaginations.
“My mom had six children,” Jo says, “so she never got to go anywhere. She’d take us to the art gallery. She taught us what beauty was. The neighbors called her a drill sergeant; we followed her like little ducklings in a row.”
Renowned artist and muralist Thomas Hart Benton lived a block away. Jo remembers trick-or-treating with her brothers and being invited inside to see his work. “We had no idea how special that was.” Benton’s artwork is in museums across the globe, including Arkansas’ own Crystal Bridges.
All that exposure to art shows up in Jo, in the everyday, in the way she creates her haven of a home.
Jo steps to a lighted globe on a stand in a corner, finding Chapala, Mexico, where she lived for five years before coming to Arkansas. By then she was retired from her job as captain of a Boeing 727 cargo plane. She’d been a flight instructor, flight engineer, ferried planes from one place to another, and had flown commuter planes. When she took her first psychological test, the airline told her there was a problem. Her profile came back as male. She explained about growing up with so many rambunctious brothers, and she was hired.
Aviation was primarily a man’s game, but so what. Jo had wanted to fly since she was a young girl.
“I was hunting with my dad, and an airplane flew overhead. I said, ‘I want it,’ and my dad said, ‘You can’t have it.’” Jo persisted, and after much back-and-forth, her dad shot his rifle into the air, proving there was no way to bring down the plane. “I knew if my dad couldn’t shoot it, I couldn’t have it.”
Well, at least not for a while.
While living in Mexico, Jo’s home was even smaller, a 200-square-foot cabin in the Cascade Mountains. The winter before she left the country, there had been a total accumulation of ten feet of snow.
Jo might have stayed longer in Chapala. She loved the kindness of the people, the climate that reminded her of San Diego. She admired the strong families, with fathers who were joyfully involved in their children’s lives. But as she grew older, she realized it was time to return to the States. She looked everywhere for a small house with a big yard, and found it in an old neighborhood in Fort Smith.
Jo doesn’t have a car. She walks her dogs four or five times a day. She’s within an easy stroll of restaurants, a pharmacy, and a grocery store. She loves the South, with its nice manners. With neighbors calling her “Miss Jo.”
Since moving, she’s befriended two stray cats that now eat dinner each evening and stay until dawn. The cats share the nights with Stella and Bob 2.0, who started life in a puppy mill. The pups follow Jo around like she’s their fairy godmother.
You can see why. Jo’s crew could be living in an enchanted forest, judging by the beauty of the place. And all because Jo decided that one day she’d like to have a park of her own.
