VA nurse gives back to community that helped her heal
By Phillip Boughton, Public Affairs Specialist
In Eureka’s Pine Hill neighborhood, there is a long, gray wall. It is a canvas for transience, a slab of urban parchment where the tags of the anonymous appear, are painted over, and appear again.
It is a cycle of forgetting. Aimée Woods, a Licensed Vocational Nurse at Eureka VA Clinic, has spent her career tending to the wounds of others and decided it was time to make a mark that would not, could not, be so easily erased. And in doing so, she began to suture her own soul. It is a story of survival, painted by a survivor. A permanent record of a woman who was broken and is now, stroke by deliberate stroke, making herself whole again.
Her creation, a large, reddish-orange octopus, now unfurls its arms across the concrete. It is a vibrant, breathing, beautiful piece of art in a place full of its own natural beauty. A labor of love that feels less like public art and more like a form of therapy rendered in gallons of colorful paint. For Woods, the mural is a testament to a resilience that’s marked her journey.
The past few years have been a season of fracture. A painful divorce that stripped away her social world. The motorcycle accident that broke her hands, her collarbone, and shattered her scapula. The physical damage was a brutal, external echo of the internal wreckage. Confined to a bed, she was forced to reckon with a solitude that was both physical and emotional.
But in that isolation, a different community emerged. Riders from the motorcycle world showed up with meals and company, revealing a beautiful side to the area she hadn’t seen. It was a flicker of light. As her body mended from the surgeries then therapy, her daily walks began. And always, there was the wall—a blank slate waiting for a story worth telling.
She wondered if she could be the one to tell it.
Woods, a lifelong artist, knew she could do it despite not taking on a project of this size before.
“I’m so proud of myself. I didn’t let the size of the wall shake me.”
In an interview with Isabella Vanderheiden of the Lost Coast Outpost, Woods explained why it was always going to be an octopus. “They’re incredibly intelligent creatures, but they’re also survivors,” Woods explains. “They’re adaptive and resilient, and even able to regenerate their limbs when they’re attacked or injured.”
The metaphor is not lost on her. She, too, is learning to adapt, to rebuild, to regenerate what was broken.
First, she had to learn to hold a brush again. Her hands, once skilled in the precise acts of nursing and painting, had to be retrained. Paint is a forgiving medium, and she is an exceptionally patient person. The act of covering a mistake, of going back over a line, became part of the process.
Every day after her shift at Eureka VA Clinic, where she’s worked for the last 4 years, she returns to the wall. She chips away at the sprawling creature, her progress slow and steady. A sure testament to her patience, the neighborhood noticed.
“It’s really helped folks get to know me better,” says Woods. “A lot of the Vets have come to find me at work and thank me.”
A shouted compliment from a car window, a playful honk of approval.
“I’m just happy to be able to give back to the community that helped heal me.”