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June 21 2025 Work Party
A Green Thought by Katharine Towers Say instead it was an evening in head-highbracken with its smell of dark and medicine.Thinking green of the infecting fern where you may crouch and not be known,lodging your feet for good amid the stalks.A bower is a dwelling place or once it was a cage for pent-up singing birds. Look down to see the warp and weft of root.All the world is in these clutches. Look up to clock the fern’s drab underneathblotched with spores you mustn’t breathe.Breathe in deep. There’s nowhere else to live.
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June 14 2025 Work Party
A duckling worked with us for a time, nibbling on plants while we weeded. A heron perched on a nearby log. Some of us dug into a thick stand of reed canary grass, others of us combed over an area we had worked before, clipping and pulling reed canary grass from among native rushes and sedges. We ferreted out thistle, blackberry, and mullein, lifted bags of plant clippings up to the bridge, pushed them across the boardwalk, drove them across the street to be composted. A perfect day of quiet resistance.
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June 7 2025 Work Party
Boisterous clipping and digging of canes, pulling up a carpet of ivy, young people have brought their older humans along. We add our blackberry and ivy to the raft, ferry more to the field for pick up, get stung by nettles five times. A black-tailed deer grazes across the way. Hard rain starts to fall, scattering some of us, the rest of us carry on. The underground infrastructure of a very old Himalayan blackberry is exhumed, some concrete detritus moved. We leave with so much distance travelled in just three hours.
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May 10 2025 Work Party
We continued clearing a new patch of Himalayan blackberry, started on a patch of knotweed, the stalks of these like giants. Rescued a fern, excavated more trash, were stung by nettles. Fringe cup and large-leaved avens watched from along the trail.
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May 3 2025 Work Party
It feels good to see the tender bright green tufts of new growth on our baby conifers, to see you remove the blackberry regrowth from among them, to watch a black-tailed deer cautiously watch us, to be here with you. This is hope.
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April 12 2025 Work Party
It is always good to be with you.
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March 22 2025 Work Party
Mallards, American robins, Spotted Towhees. An otter, a salamander. Raptors, maybe red-tailed hawks? Willows staked along the south bank just weeks ago budding, osoberry, red elderberry, and snowberry becoming green. We reached the tree that a month ago seemed so far away, revealed a goat track hidden by brambles, pulled barbed wire out of the ground. A collapsing empire, cancer, hospice. These things cannot be left behind, but despite their presence, for a moment that stretches to hours, I feel ease.
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March 15 2025 Work Party
The best problem to have is not enough root slayers.
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March 8 2025 Work Party
You are a gift.
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January 25 2025 Work Party
Crisp cold bright blue sky. Himalayan blackberry canes cut. Reed canary grass trimmed. Tree climbed. You hid. You were found.
