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Choking back tears, an MMI Guild member made it official.
After 40 straight years, there would be no garden walk in 2008.
The room fell silent. No one knew what to say.
The event had seemed like a well-oiled machine. Why wouldn’t it work this year?
Truth is, it was a combination of unfortunate circumstances that I won’t go into, because it’s irrelevant now.
The mood was somber that day in the boardroom, but by the next monthly meeting, the cloud had lifted.
Already the guild had begun work on 2009’s Garden Walk. With each month, the excitement and enthusiasm grew.
To say the Garden Walk was back in “full” force on Sunday, June 14, would not be an overstatement.
At the gardens, I heard the words, “beauty-ful, wonder-ful and color-ful” over and over. One woman uttered quite the compliment when she said Dr. Frederic Ogren’s yard rivaled Omaha’s Lauritzen Gardens.
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Advance and day of ticket sales along with corporate donations garnered more than $35,000 for research and programs at MMI for children and adults with developmental disabilities.
These events don’t pull themselves off. It takes hours upon hours to make them look effortless. And the guild really outdid itself this year.
It’s a great feeling to be happy for someone else and I couldn’t be happier for the members of the guild. Their relentless determination to bring back an event that the entire community looks forward to each year truly paid off.
I can only imagine what next year will be like.