If anyone proves you dont have to be born here to embody this places spirit, its Mel Meo. Much as anyone has been, Meo was Pine Island, in all its beauty, grit, whimsy and pathos.

The beloved artist and community matriarch died at her Bokeelia home April 20. She was 64.

Although her heart cancer had beencommon knowledge (islands are like that), news of her death was still a shock, as islanders struggledto come to grips. Maybe if she hadnt been so generous, in so many ways, it would have been easier to reckon with her loss, but Meos gifts were showered far and wide.

She helped define the Pine Island aesthetic by turning her artists eye to what illuminatedits character. The design of the Pine Island flag was hers and included a fish house at sunset, mangos, mullet, a Calusa Indian and a bald eagle. The motto suited her as well: Community rooted in caring.

Born in Indianapolis, she moved here as a girl with parents Mable and Rocco and brother David. The family bought what was then the SeaBreeze restaurant on Bokeelia and she worked side by side with her dad, while her mother caught the fish. She graduated from North Fort Myers High and attended Lee County Vocational/High Tech Center to learn welding.

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Art was always part of her life. "Growing up in Bokeelia, she told The News-Press in 1995, there wasn't a lot to do, so I learned to draw, paint, sew, bake anything to entertain myself,'' Meo said. `"My mom was always into crafts and I learned a lot of that from her. We did a lot of artsy-craftsy things.''

When she and her fisherman future husband Steve Longtook a boat trip to the upscale, private island of Useppa, she was offered a job as cook at the Tarpon Bar. They were later married there.

Meo took several years off to raise her three children, while her husband fished until the 1995 net ban went off like a bomb in the commercial fishing community, sending the industry into a tailspin.

"People have had heart attacks, strokes; I had a stroke recently," she said in an interview five years later "People are stressed to the hilt. The emotional part is never going to be healed. I have to work every day on trying not to blame the people who voted for the net ban and not hold them in contempt. People don't care. They say, `Hey, after five years, get over it.' But it's like if a member of your family dies, try to fill that hole.

"My son is still in shock. Since he was a little guy, he just knew what he wanted to do. Now he's working to get his captain's license to haul people. But that's not what he wants to do. He wants to feed people. We were always proud to feed people. But now we're bad guys."

Yet without the net ban, the world might never have met Meo.

With her husbands main source of income gone, she turned to what she knew: cooking and painting. She opened a funky eatery/gallery combo, Fish-n-Art, in a repurposed island motel court. "It was a natural. My husband's a fisherman. I'm an artist," Meo later recalled. Shed cook and sell her husband's fresh catches from behind a small deli counter and kitchen bearing a caricature of Rocco, on the door. The space was filled with her creations: a powder blue chair with its curvy back that became an ideal canvas for bikini-clad, 1950s bombshell Betty Page;a fish-shaped wood carving painted avocado green declared "Live and let fish" to passers-by who read the commandment plastered on its citrus-colored scales.

"I'm a really good cook, so it caught on really fast," Meo told The News-Press in 2000.

But the place was more than an artsy diner. Saturday nights, Meo, her sister and a friend would tease their hair up into beehives, slip into padded torpedo bras and cat glasses and mount impromptu retro stage shows, often coaxing their customers into the act. Many of those customers became friends, as they stayed to talk about art, fishing, politics and family.

"I'm a real good listener. I became the local psychiatrist as well," Meo joked.

After six years, with demand for her pieces rising, she closed Fish-n-Art to focus on showing and selling her work in off-island galleries in Fort Myers, Sanibel, Pine Island and Naples.

Year after year, she donated pieces to Arts for ACT, an annual auction benefiting Abuse Counseling and Treatment, a shelter for rape and domestic violence victims and their children.

In2002, she shared the stage with celebrity auctioneer Lily Tomlin. Two years later, Hurricane Charley blew the roof off her stilt house, but spared her gallery, so she kept creating.

Meo found a clientele hungry for her images, which she painted with an increasing sense of urgency as old fish houses became upscale marinas, groves sold to developers and roadside fruit stands shuttered.

"I just see eras going by really fast, and the island changing," she told The News-Press. "I'm just happy to paint things and have it in my memory and other people's memory before it's gone."

Now that she's gone, observed Fort Myers arts advocate Sunny Lubner, "Southwest Florida just became more monochromatic."

Mel Meois survived by her three children Nathan Long, Anna Long and Luke Long; and three siblings David Meo, Rita Meo Sgro and Monica Meo and two grandchildren.

Her memorial service, at which anyone who knew her is welcome, will be Saturday, May 14at Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal Church, 12175 Stringfellow Road, Bokeelia, time to be announced.

In leiu of flowers, please send donations to: Pine Island Playhouse,5861 Wisconsin St., Bokeelia, FL 33922 or the Pine Island Elementary Art Program, 5360 Ridgewood Drive, Bokeelia, FL 33922.

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Artist, advocate Mel Meo was a Pine Island treasure - News-Press