A lot of what Mary Roberson does is for the birds.

Really.

She makes houses for her feathered friends out of gourds, decorating them with a wood-burning tool, bright paints, or both, at her home on Eagle Lake.

“This one will be a duplex,” she said, holding up a large gourd with two holes in it. “Two birds can live in it. Will they get along? That’s up to them.”

Mary also burns animal figures into wooden plaques, and her kitchen table is overflowing with her work. The designs are unusual and many are original, but she claimed all the good ones are gone — sold at Eagle Lake’s first Spring Fling.

Her venture into gourd painting began about six months ago when she and two friends, Bonnie Hardin and Kitty Haney, went to a gourd festival in Collinsville, near Meridian. Mary heard about the festival and wanted to see what it was all about, and her friends “are much younger than I am, and I have to keep them entertained.”

At 81 — she’s still 80 until June 2 — Mary Roberson speaks with a smile on her face and in her voice. There’s a bit of mischief and amusement that surfaces when she talks, in the stories she tells, and in her outlook on life.

At the festival, she took a few classes. One was painting a gourd, the other was how to cut it, and, Mary said, “We just had the best time, and I’ve been hooked ever since.”

She had to have gourds, and they came from friends and someone in Tallulah. Others she bought while visiting her son Mel in South Carolina, near the Georgia border. She saw a place with row after row of gourds, “and I said, ‘Pull in this driveway.’ I came out of there with two big bags of gourds.” She’s got some seed to plant her own crop — if it will quit raining long enough. She doesn’t intend to run out of gourds.

Her son Clyde wanted to know what in the world she was going to do with them, and, Mary said, “Well, I don’t know. Somebody might want some, or I might push some off on my grandchildren.”

When the Spring Fling was planned, Clyde’s wife, Cindy, insisted Mary get a booth and sell gourds. She even came up with a name — “Miss Mary’s Gourd’ious Creations.”

“Ya’ll better buy ’em all,” Mary said. “If you don’t, my Christmas list is already done.”

In the last six months, she has made over 100 gourd houses because she enjoys it, and “I cannot sit and watch television. I either have to read or have something in my hands to do,” adding that one can’t do everything — that “you have to cull some things,” and though she had rather work in the yard or paint gourds, “every once in a while, I have to mop or vacuum.”

She has a studio that she simply calls a room where she does her painting, but she claims it is “truly a disgrace. I’d lock the door if I saw someone coming.” That’s where she applies her designs and ideas to her gourds either with a wood burner or paint. Clyde cuts the holes for her “because he’s afraid I would cause more damage than good.”

She likes holes that are 1.75 inches in diameter because “the larger ones aren’t as pretty on a bird house. The birds will just have to take their chances. If they don’t feel like they can fit in my house, then go somewhere else.”

She uses metallic and acrylic paints and sometimes shoe and ink dyes. She never had a wood burner in her hands until recently — though her boys played with them when they were little and she was always afraid they would leave them on and burn the house down — and one day she was applying the paint to a gourd, “trying to get the feel, and I curved it around this way, made a mark down the middle, and I said, I’m going to make a leaf.” The result was her own unique design.

Though she has never seen a gourd she didn’t like, Mary admits she has one she keeps hidden because she wasn’t pleased with what she put on it. “I just can’t throw it away,” she said, “so I’m going to wrap that fellow with cord” to hide the design.

She claims she isn’t an artist and that, except for one grandson, artistic talent doesn’t run in the family. She’s not being modest, she said, but she has friends who are artists, and she can’t see her work in that league.

Her parents, she said, didn’t have time for art: “They had babies. I was the second child in a family of 12.” Her grandfather and three of her uncles were physicians, and that’s what she wanted to be, but those were depression years and there was little money, so she became a teacher.

Mary was born in Lawrence County, about halfway between Monticello and Silver Creek, “but we went mostly to Silver Creek. Monticello was in the Pearl River Valley and there was a big, high hill and the old Model T — well, it was hard for it to climb up that hill. It was easier to go on the level road to Silver Creek.”

She taught in Lawrence County before she and her husband and three sons — Mel, Clyde and John — moved to Vicksburg in 1961. She taught at Southern Business College, then worked for the River Commission until she retired. After her husband’s death, she moved in with Clyde, living for a while in the Jeff Davis community before they moved to Eagle Lake. Mel lives in South Carolina, and John is in Texas. She has five grandsons and a granddaughter.

When Mary isn’t painting gourds, she finds enough to keep her busy. She works with the Salvation Army Women’s Auxiliary, is a member of the WMU and the Baptist church, is in the Bunco Club and is part of a soup and sandwich group. She’s the proud Quueen Mother of the Ladies of the Lake, a Red Hat Society group.

“I don’t have time to be lazy,” she said.

Painting gourds takes up any spare time she might have. She said, “There is only so much you can do with a gourd,” but it’s fun. And, when it ceases to be fun, she’ll quit.

“I don’t have a talent,” Mary said “This is just something that happened.”

Her friends would beg to differ.

Gordon Cotton is an author and historian who lives in Vicksburg.