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On the way to a cottage in Ontario’s Kawartha Lakes district Mike and I passed the house above with dozens and dozens of balls on the lawn. Beguiled by the craziness of the scene, I turned the car around and went back to investigate. Jim Barnes, the jovial owner of this cockamammie spread on Highway 1 between Fowlers Corners and Bridgenorth, gets lots of curious strangers pulling into his driveway, people like me who just have to know, “What’s with the balls?”

Jim says it all started about six years ago when he rounded up all the balls in the house and put them out in advance of a visit by his grandkids. “Boys, girls, everybody likes to play with a ball,” he says. Well, Jim decided to leave them in the yard and before he knew it people were giving him balls–balls for his birthday, balls for Christmas. Jim reckons that at one point he had about 120 balls on the property.

The balls you see in these photos are just part of the Barnes ball collection; I found Jim in his workshop beneath a net full of even more balls: “I bring them out in the spring and put them away again in the fall,” he says. For three Canadian seasons Jim puts a smile on the faces of passing drivers; on Mother’s Day he uses the balls to spell out Mom, and on Father’s Day, Dad. When it comes to crazy neighbours, Jim Barnes is the good kind, the kind whose decorating flights of fancy make the world a happier place.