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August 24 2024 Work Party
Light rain. Bird nest. Conversation and companionship.
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April 13 2024 Work Party
Thank you.
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March 16 2024 Work Party
A copse of trees hides a stand of holly. The youngest among us recruits help, instructs on tools, leads the way. It is warm, too warm for this time of year, we peel off layers, elderberry and red flowering currant bloom weeks earlier than usual. What do the nesting birds make of the unseasonable warmth? An elder wrenches tangled holly roots from between those of a grown cottonwood, we unearth gnarled blackberry root balls nearby, pull up the carpet of ivy. An old Coke can, shards from a broken pane of glass, tennis balls shorn of fuzz. Everywhere we have touched this landscape. A silent bald eagle and a crying…
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September 23 2023 Work Party
Digging blackberry regrowth, felling English hawthorn. Gently tending to trailing blackberry and a baby sword fern, whispering with an adolescent Western red cedar. A thin layer of compost, a generously overlapped layer of cardboard, a thick layer of mulch. Some cardboard left bare, puddles gathered. Young people with heads together, talk babbling over talk, laughter, connection, so much love bouncing from you to me to root slayers to conifers to cottonwoods, everywhere, then rain. Light at first, then heavier, it soaks us, pelts upturned faces, drips from leaves, soaks into soil, seeps into roots, grows us, grows everything.
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September 2 2023 Work Party
Siblings, friends, a candidate, people young through middle age. More English hawthorn comes down, we reclaim ground from blackberry grow back. Humans walk through. Dogs walk through. Blackberries are plucked from cut brambles, wheelbarrows are loaded with root balls and branches, tender attention is payed to native trailing blackberry. We fill one small patch of earth with love.
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July 22 2023 Work Party
You send your heartbeat 100 feet. Water sloshes from pails. You smile, your gaze steady, encouraging. I pull out tiny English hawthorn, ferret out fast-growing black locust hiding in the shade of towering cottonwoods, dig a horse chestnut on the verge of adolescence. We bear the heat and sun for the good of our first native plantings. There is refuge in the shade and in being with you.
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July 1 2023 Work Party
Cleaver seeds ride along. English hawthorn fall. You point out the musical clatter of dry canes and sticks as they rake across the ground. Now I delight in it, too.
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June 17 2023 Work Party
A song for you.
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May 20 2023 Work Party
New friends, familiar friends. The Molina Crew. We know each other by our names, by the water nearest our homes, by our popsicle flavor preferences. We find shade. Popsicles drip. Mango is deemed best. Pogo shovel jumps, you move downed trees and bond over tech burnout. We collectively fall in love with the weed wrench, you discover it pulls up blackberry as well as anything else. The sun embraces us, the work is everything all at once, we are right where we are meant to be. You were all so very kind and generous. And I thank you for it.
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April 1, 2023 Work Party
A song for you.
