A couple weeks ago, a woman called me who didn't even have my name, but some friend of hers had told her that I could use lilac wood and she had just cut down a lilac bush. I told her I would ask my friends and see if I could find someone going to Halifax who cold pick it up for me. Some friends did go, but they didn't get time to go get the wood. But sooner or later, I will get it. A woman I have known for many years also told me she had cut down a lilac and would give it to me, but I haven't got it yet. I guess I could just drive over there and get it.
I just decided I should post here about that wood, but I see that I haven't posted about the Christmas fair I went to the 3rd and 4th of December. I sold over $2300 worth of spoons, but not so much lilac, because I don't have much lilac wood left. If I added up how much was lilac, I forget how much it was.
I have spent the last few days cleaning up the scraps, making little spoons and spreaders out of the scraps I saved from making bigger spoons and spatulas, and a good many of those scraps were lilac. So I made a bunch of lilac spoons, but they are all pretty small, or even tiny.

They did work. Timmy is back for a couple weeks from Alberta and he and John K. came and hauled gravel and spread it on my road into the area where I want to make the labyrinth. They spread 14 loads of gravel and billed me a $2100 for the gravel, $315 for spreading it and $150 for haulin the dozer over here, plus tax. Timmy said 15 cm of snow is predicted for tomorrow, which probably puts an end to the project til spring, but I won't be able to afford any more til I sell some more lilac spoons and things anyway. He thinks it will take about that much more to get the road clear across the bog. Fooey, I was hoping to be able to finish it this fall so I would be able to plant in the spring.
I need some more lilac wood, I think, to be able to make enough more things to raise that much money!

November 22, a sunny day, and the equipment operator has come with a truck I can hear down at the road and has walked up and started the bulldozer and is driving it down there. Has he come to work, or to take the machine away? We will soon know, I guess. He didn't come talk to me.

Pouring rain all day. No sign of the operator, but then it's a holiday. But it rained enough it may not dry sufficiently before it snows. It was warm today though. I wish I'd looked at the temperaturein the afternoon.

As you can see, if you look at the dates of these posts, it has been over a month since a heavy equipment operator I've dealt with before promised to come look at it, but nothing happened. I called him and he said again he'd come but I didn't hear from him. So I called again and he said he had come but it was too wet. He said he'd come again. He did and wanted to know how much mony I was willin to spend before he brought the equipment back from wherever it was. I told him and he said he'd call Timmy, who owns the machines.
Yesterday I went early in the morning to take my car to have a rear wheel bearing replaced but they never got to look at it that day, so I had to stay overnight at my daughter's place, and they got it done sometime in the middle of the day. I went to a store and a gas station and came home, and I find the dozer here. So he is finally ready to begin. But heavy rain is predicted tomorrow and tomorrow night and rain the next day, so we will see how far he can get.
Delays and mechanical problems have been plaguing my effort to get enough spoons made for the Christmas fair I'm going to the first weekend in December, too. One of those delays is that a woman who promised to bring me a piece of lilac she cut down went to the US so I will have to wait til she comes back to get that. As I said last post (or was it the one before?), I am almost out of lilac wood except for small scraps. I wish I had some for this fair coming up.
Terron

I thought it was a while since I had deposited money in the savings account in which I am putting money for the lilac labyrinth, so I looked up in the passbook and found the last time was 22 July. I went through my record book and added up all the lilac ones I'd sold since, and it comes to $606. I wasn't sure I had that much. I find, on counting it, that I do, but not a great deal more, so I didn't put it in all at once, but something like $168, which was all I could afford from my wallet when I was at the bank. But I will get it in there sooner or later, and there is now over $3000 in the account. If I had realized I was going to make this entry here, I would have looked it up first.
One question on my mind is I have given a bunch of spoons on consignment this year to various shops, and some among them are lilac. I have lists of what went where, but how do I know which ones sold? At what point do I deposit that money, if I don't know which ones sold?
I guess I have to make up my mind on a system, but anyhow, I need to make sure not to forget those ones.
I am nearly out of lilac wood too. I have only scraps left, really, though a lot of those will make a little spoon or a butterknife type of spreader.
I'd better get to bed now.

At the end of the summer that wasn't

I thought it would dry out in the summer, but you could ay we didn't really have any summer. July was in the 50sF, 10-15C with frequent rain and August wasn't much different. My corn didn't grow to its usual size and doesn't look like it is going to produce anything at all. Some of the beans rotted in the ground, some grew, but have been behind. Peas, kale and lettuce did OK.
Anyhow, it never got dry enough that I thought it would make it certain I could get across the swamp. Timmy, who was the guy I called about the road before, is working in Fort McMurray, Alberta. But another guy is taking over for him here in the meantime and my son-in-law called him to do a job around the back of the house to change the grade a little and put in a drain to keep water from the driveway from running up against the foundation, so he came yesterday to inquire about the location of the water pipe and any buried wires he will have to avoid. I asked him to look at the road over the swamp to see what it would take to make it so I could get over with my 4 wheeler. He is going to do that. So I still have hopes of being ready to plant lilacs next spring.
I also got an e mail and then a phone call from a man who established a lilac-planting project in memory of his deceased daughter. He recommended I join the International Lilac Society and write something for their magazine about my project and I might get support from many people interested in lilacs. He also told me about a huge lilac nursery called Syringa Plus, if I remember right, and offered to help me with information, &c. So I did send in $25 to join that society. I haven't heard back yet, though.
Anyhow, that is all I have to report just now, but at least I have something to report, which hasn't happened for a while.

Well, Rats! Wayne came and he worked 4 1/2 hours and then had to go for more fuel. He said he was afraid that, if he went across the swamp one more time, the road would be so torn up he couldn't do it again, but he figured it would take him twice as much time more as he already spent, which would require him to come out again to fuel his machine again. So he needs to go in and out twice. That means he has to wait til it gets drier, or til the road is improved. But I don't have enough money to fix the road now.
Besides, he doesn't want to go ahead until I go in there and make sure he's doing what I want, but after he went over it, he doesn't think I can get over on the 4 wheeler. There is another way around, in which you stay on dry, firm ground, but that means going over the neighbor's place, and she's mad at me. The Dept. of Agriculture came and took away all her animals, and she blames me, as well as the rest of the people on the road, because when she asked they told her that everybody on the road was griping.
I wrote her a letter right after I found out about it, because it was not myself who called them, although I have had more damage from them than anyone else, but evidently she doesn't believe me. Anyhow, I doubt she'll let me go across her property now. So, what will I do?
Another problem is that, since there is a lot more woods there than I thought there would be, there is a thicker pile of chips than I expected. Wayne thinks there may be as much as 2 1/2 feet of them in some places. A few inches would be OK, but such a deep layer is too much. I will have to move them some way, and I suppose the most practical would be to have some sort of tractor push them into a heap at the edge of the clearing. I would like to make them into charcoal, but that will take a while. All this means the whole project will cost more than I was figuring on. My daughter will say, "I told you so." And I will have to wait longer to finish it, because I don't have the money for all that yet.

This morning I got a call from Wayne, the man with the machine that clears the ground by chopping all the wood up into chips. He said he has to sharpen the teeth of his machine today and he can come tomorrow morning. I said I went down there with my 4-wheeler, but didn't attempt to go over, because I was afraid of getting stuck when I was down there all by myself, so maybe he should come look at it to make sure it's dry enough to get across the swamp before he brings his machine out. He said, if I went down there, he doesn't think he'll have any trouble.
I really need to get the road improved, but I don't have enough money. I hope it is nearer the shorter time in his estimate for clearing, too. No word about the lilacs that are to come in the mail, yet, and I am hoping the place will be ready for them by the time they come.

It has been a while since I have had anything to post. I suppose I could have posted every time I sold another lilac spoon. I have to add up how many I have sold but not yet put the money in my labyrinth account. I didn't know how long they'd leave a blog here if no activity happened on it, so I was alarmed when it told me there was no such blog, but I discovered right away it was because of a typo in the word labyrinth.
Anyhow, the news right now is that I have called to get the man with the machine over to finish clearing trhe area where the labyrinth is going to be. I hope it will be ready before the lilac bushes come that are replacements for the ones that turned out to be dead when I bought them last year. I don't know just when that will be, but it could be almost any time, now.
I hope not everybody has forgotten about this project and this blog.

I haven't posted for a while, partly because it is winter now, some inches of snow and nothing can happen now til spring, and partly because there is something I don't know what to do about.
Timmy and Wayne, when they first walked over to look at the place, mistook where I mean to clear, so the estimate was distinctly lower than it will be to clear the part I really want cleared. The place they had in mind is too wet for lilacs. Where I do want to put it is grown up to a pretty thick growth of young trees, so it will take a day and a half to 2 more days with his machine. Which is to say $1500 to $2200 more. What they already did has used up all the money I had saved for it. I would like to pay for this completely out of money from lilac wood. But I worry the price of oil could rise quite a lot before I get it done, and make it hard to pay for if I wait too long.
I could pay for it with other spoon money and then pay myself back with money from lilac spoons and bowls. That is the solution I am leaning towards, now. I got some more lilac at the fair in Halifax the 4th and 5th of December, and have cut most of it into spoons already. I also have some more, mainly scraps, left over from the previous lilac, and I need to go over all the lilac stuff I sold and make sure it all got credited, but I doubt I'll have enough to pay for the whole thing until I get more lilac wood, and get it made into something salable. So there could be a long delay if I don't use some other resources for the time being. Still, I have been told more than once, "If I had known, I would have given you the lilac bush I cut down." So maybe I should advertise for lilac wood.
Does anybody have any good ideas to tell me?

Here is my mother's poem, which I told about on the dream forum. I am posting it here so that all the pictures can be shown, which seemed too much for the forum. She went to look at Smith Rocks in Oregon, trying to understand what the little ancient stone people on the tops of the cliffs were thinking, as they look down on us from above. She said it wasn't easy, because they don't speak our language. But after she had rewritten her old poem to express what she wanted to say, she said, "It's like the little ancient people are coming home."

Ancient People

Bees hum with the blossoms,
humming blossoms,
singing strings,
fine, high power, electric air
filled with Presence
fresh from the Source.
Sensed before seen,
green, gold and red
scintillating

swinging blossoms
exhilarating union
tingling skin
prickling anticipation
incomprehensible
unknown by intellect.

Imperishable beauty,
wonder of the Source,
the eternity of blue beyond
and between and
in my lungs -

All
is on fire to be spent!




What is a tree dripping with blossoms for ?
Why is a blossom?
and the liquid air it exhales?
Is the bee only buzzy?
Or is it your chorus?
"Joy to this Day
To creation, Peace,
Interdependence,
Independence.
Inter and in dependence is free .....… dom"
You are shouting,
Let’s celebrate
this tree
of
LIFE!

What’s been happening where my feet are?
What goes unseen without which
Nothing would be where my eyes are?
What unseen communities of interdependence,
What dance of joy is outlined there?

Activity of the ages,
tons of ages upon tons,
pressed into stone,
dissolved from stone,
burnt & drowned and burnt again

damp, slimy beginnings,
wormy, squirmy struggles
ocean depths and silent inching,
the life that fed life piled deep,

mountain heights distilled
for NOW
always NOW
the forever NOW
even the NOWS I'll never see!

A Song!
What is more NOW than a Song...
and a dance?

“Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all you lands”

And come before Presence .… with a flower

There’s still more to exhale
Is it that as we exhale we are given?

Of course!
The poem never ends...

NOW is forever
NOW is the Word

but only when it’s heard...


Poem by Ruth Alura Dodd 1968 & 2010
Art Work by RAD 1968



Location: Four Springs, California
Photos by JKD & NJDL, 9/2010
Location: Smith Rocks, Oregon
Composed and printed by Geobob Press