Art and Literature

Guest post by Margaret Mils, Oregon WOWnet member

Guest post by Oregon WOWnet member Fiona Rhea
Twin Tree
by Fiona Rhea
Two seeds landed here because that is how God meant it to be,
Nourished from the heavens above, together they grew like twins, almost inseparably.
Alas, one grew tall, the other branched off from the straight and narrow call.
Yet in later years, changed it's spin to return next to its twin.
Their souls having found each other, touched  by the breeze,
rejoiced by the heavenly chime of the bristling leaves,

My mom is the reason I'm connected to our forestland. I'm shy to write about my land connection, which manifests as creative inspiration, much less talk about it, because my mom passed away over two years ago. Now the reasons for loving our stewardship forestland are so deep, so nuanced, and so filled with grief that I fear I might fall apart were I to explain it all. Simply put: all reasons lead back to my mom.

Every forest has a story to tell.

Antelope Valley, Idaho (a prose poem)

—Renée E. D’Aoust

 

In the Cabinet Mountain Wilderness you wait—gear ready—for Indian Paintbrush to shrivel and die. I pack your saddle bag: dried fruit, chocolate, quick oats. Catch myself falling toward you like the elk caught in your archer’s eye. Your arrow flies through Western larch, cedars, Ponderosa pines. “A clean kill,” you whisper. As the elk falls, I find solid ground. It is a good hunt: this looking for self through you.

 

My mom kept the fridge on the porch. It was not convenient. But Mom despised the sound of the electric hum. “I’m living out here in the woods, and I have to deal with that sound?” she would ask, rhetorically.

On a colorful fall weekend in October 2011, twenty-one women landowners headed out to Camp Susque in Trout Run, PA for the inaugural Women and Their Woods Educational Retreat.