"Cleaning Up Ruby's World"

Ruby, the Recycling Octopus, and Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, are on a mission: clean up the litter in Spencerville Park before it washes into local streams, travels to the Chesapeake Bay, and eventually reaches Ruby’s ocean home.

Ruby can hardly believe that trash found in the ocean might have started hundreds of miles away. Athena, of course, is happy to explain.

The Chesapeake Bay watershed stretches across parts of six states and Washington, D.C. Thousands of streams and rivers connect our neighborhoods, parks, farms and cities to the Bay. That means the cup or plastic bottle dropped beside a storm drain in Montgomery County doesn’t necessarily stay here. When it rains, litter can begin a surprisingly long journey downstream.

Fortunately, Ruby and Athena have some help.

In Baltimore, the wonderfully named Mr. Trash Wheel intercepts floating garbage before it can travel farther through the harbor. Here in Montgomery County, parks, nonprofits, volunteers and artists have tackled the problem through litter cleanups and painted storm drains—colorful reminders that what enters those drains eventually enters our waterways.

Plastic is especially troublesome. It doesn’t simply disappear. It breaks into smaller and smaller pieces, eventually becoming microplastics that find their way into aquatic ecosystems and the creatures living there.

This problem has been on my mind—and in my artwork—for years.

Several years ago, I applied for a grant that would have sent me to Vietnam to paint about ocean plastic pollution. I didn’t receive it, and I was terribly disappointed. My 101-year-old granny listened to me and simply said,

“It’s okay, honey. There’s a reason this happened. You have to believe that.”

As grandmothers so often are, she was right.

Instead of traveling halfway around the world to tell the story of ocean pollution, I began looking more closely at what was happening right here at home. I realized that the little stream running through a neighborhood, the storm drain at the edge of a parking lot, the Chesapeake Bay, and the vast ocean beyond it aren’t separate places at all.

They’re connected by water.

And somewhere along the way, Ruby became part of that story too—reminding me that caring for the ocean can begin surprisingly far from its shore.

One painting, one storm drain, and one story at a time.