Last week, author and blogger (4am Writer) Kate Johnston published a post about getting 1 million supporters to help save the monarch butterfly. Kate was very happy for me to republish that here on Learning from Dogs. Please read it and sign up.
World Wildlife Fund has set a goal – getting 1 million supporters to help save the monarch butterfly.
Threatened by illegal logging, global warming, herbicide use, and vanishing food source (milkweed) for caterpillars, monarchs are in serious danger.
“Now more than ever, Mexico, the United States, and Canada should increase their conservation efforts to protect and restore the habitat of this butterfly along its migratory route,” said Omar Vidal, Director General for WWF-Mexico.
Last year, I began planting my own butterfly garden in an effort to help provide a habitat for monarch butterflies, and any other form of wildlife that might seek food and shelter there.
BEFORE
Ready for planting!
AFTER
Not very organized and probably have too much in there, but I didn’t expect everything to take off the way it did!
Turtles come through my backyard every summer to lay their eggs in the same place. Each generation of turtle somehow knows the exact route, like they have their own inner GPS.See the butterfly in the middle of the milkweed? This is not a monarch, as it has no white spots. I think it might be a fritillary, maybe the variegated species.This is a harmless garter snake, and they love my garden!Just a baby, though. Hubs still took off, so my son had to take the pics.Hubs nearly ran over this guy with the mower. I had to come and get it ‘cuz it’s a snapping turtle!
Spring is just around the corner in the US, and the monarch butterflies will be heading along their migratory route, back to their northern homes. They will be in search of food and shelter. They will need milkweed, the only plant on which they lay their eggs and the one food source for their babies.
If you have a backyard, won’t you consider providing a home for some beautiful monarchs? Even if you’re sans yard, you can still fight for their survival.
In view of all that’s been happening these last few weeks, this is perfect!
We are exactly one month away from Christmas Day! Not sure if that’s scary or satisfying. For years, I have always embraced mid-Winter’s Day on December 21st as the bottom of the slope; so to speak. Thus on that basis Christmas Day is satisfying.
Anyway, tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day in this fine, new country of ours and I was wondering what to write to recognise both the importance, current and historical, for Americans and, at a more parochial level, for yours truly. Because, for sure, at the start of this year I wouldn’t have imagined in my wildest dreams that by Thanksgiving Day I would have a book available on Amazon!
Then along comes the perfect answer to my pondering as to what to write. A gorgeous post written by Kate Johnston of 4am Writer‘s fame. Even better, Kate giving me permission to republish it in this place. So to all my readers and followers: Happy Thanksgiving.
ooOOoo
The Writers’ Tree
Kate Johnston
There once was a tree where writers could go and put down stories in the thin bark. Over time, the stories began to bleed into each other until the day came when the tree could take no more stories.
image courtesy of wordsareart.wordpress.com
The writers didn’t have any other place to go.
They tried to write in the sand dunes, but the wind just blew the words around into gibberish.
They tried to write in the sky, but the rains came and washed everything away.
They tried to write on the animals and birds but got bitten and clawed for their trouble.
One little girl missed writing too much. Her stories were piling up inside her like rotten apples on the ground, and she needed a place to write them. She went searching. Over the hills and behind some mist that beckoned with gauzy fingers.
She found a secret place where trees grew by the dozens, trees with papery bark that wanted to give stories. She told no one of her discovery, wanting to keep all the trees to herself. She spent day after day writing story after story upon tree after tree.
When she had scribed all her stories, she abandoned the secret place and never returned. She didn’t tell a single soul about the trees that gave stories, for fear that someone wouldn’t like what she wrote, would laugh at her, wouldn’t understand.
But while she was gone, attending to other things like school, friends, growing up and starting a family, her stories began to fade away. With no one to savor them, the tales began to disappear from the trees.
Stories cannot exist without readers. And writers cannot exist without stories.
The girl, now an old woman, returned to the secret place with her grandson, thinking he would appreciate the magic of the stories on the trees. Imagine her devastation when she saw that her words were destroyed, scabbed over by new bark and punctured by holes from insects and birds.
It was plain to the girl, now an old woman, the trees could no longer give to a writer who had stopped writing. She fell to her knees and wept. She couldn’t even start over. It’d been too long since she’d come to the secret place and had forgotten how to write at all.
image courtesy of socialmeems.com
Her grandson scraped away the new growth, traced his finger over the faintest of marks, trying to find the long-lost stories. It was no use, not by himself. He was young and couldn’t yet read.
They went back to the world where they found a baker, a postman, a teacher, an electrician, and a dancer, all of whom could read and longed to write stories. The old woman and her grandson brought their new friends to the secret place to find the lost stories, but still, it was no use.
The stories were gone forever.
It had been too long since the girl, now an old woman, had written them that she couldn’t even remember how they went, or what they were about, or why she wrote them at all.
All she knew was that when she wrote, she’d felt indescribable joy. She’d fooled herself into thinking that was enough. The girl not knowing then as the old woman knows now that you must tend to joy if you want joy to stay.
Together, the friends wrote anew, wrote stories into the bark like paper. They shared their ideas and questions and hopes. They took the time to feel and find meaning in all of the stories. They laughed and cried and debated over worlds they created. They left comments with hearts to show how much each story moved them. They talked about how they couldn’t wait to bring a husband or a mother or a friend to the writers’ trees to show them the stories that grew there.
The girl, now an old woman, watched her friends’ stories blossom and grow with each reader that visited the writers’ trees. She saw the joy on her friends’ faces, saw how the joy stayed because they kept doing the one thing they loved: writing.
She wondered if she dared try again, to bring a story to life here, even though she’d failed so miserably in the past.
Image courtesy of Paul W. Koester Photography
Her friends walked the old woman to a new tree. If you love it so, they said, if writing brings you joy, they said, then write you must and never give up, they said.
The old woman took to the tree and wrote.
Her stories live on.
Happy Writersgiving!
ooOOoo
Perfect!
Dear readers: I am going to take a break for one day, so my next post will be on Friday. You all have a wonderful time wherever you are in the world.
We had just finished baking the hazelnut pie when the storm hit, a monster blizzard with enough wind that it tore down three telephone poles. The Christmas tree lights sparked and went out, as did all the other lights. I noticed snow had begun to fall in heavy clumps. The house shook violently from the fierce wind, and my mother ordered me to retrieve my brother and father. I got them out of the TV room as fast as I could, snatching Posy, my cat, as we rushed to the kitchen.
“I’m scared!” my brother wailed.
“Everything’s fine,” my father said. But I knew he was lying.
My mother handed us our winter jackets. “Go outside! Hurry!”
Just then, there was a tremendous BOOM! Bark and branches scratched my skin, and I smelled sap. A tree had smashed through our house. I screamed and fell on my behind. Posy raced off.
“POSY!” I jumped up.
“Leave her!” my mother said.
“NO!” I followed her through the scabby branches and into the dining room. She was cowering under the table. I coaxed her to me, picked her up, and hurried back to the kitchen.
“OUTSIDE! NOW!” my mother bellowed.
We were ushered into the freezing garage, and outside, which was even colder than the snow I was playing in yesterday. Dark storm clouds had rolled in and were dropping hail on our heads. A huge pine tree destroyed the house on the left, and I heard screaming. I wanted desperately to help our neighbors, but I knew we couldn’t.
I hugged Posy close to my chest. Our hearts pounded together.
“To the rock!” my mother hollered above the wind. We ran through the snow to the enormous boulder in the backyard. The world was black as coal.
We crawled under the rock, my father shielding us with his broad body. Posy hissed. My brother was crying, and my mother kissed my head.
We soon fell asleep, as trees crashed down around us. I worried for our Christmas tree farm.
When I awoke, the wind had ceased. I peered around my dad. The sky was cloudy, we were weighed down by snow, and our house was reduced to a mound of debris. Somewhere, a bird chirped.
I looked up to see a cardinal sitting in one of our Christmas trees. Only part of the Christmas tree farm had survived. The others were uprooted.
The cardinal nibbled on the string of cranberries we hung around the trees every Christmas season.
I heard my father mumble, “Everything, gone.”
“Not everything,” my mother whispered. “For one, we still have part of our farm. And…” From beside her, she pulled the hazelnut pie. It was a bit squished, but not badly. I hadn’t noticed she’d brought it. She smiled meekly. “We’ll be okay.”
And I believed her.
So we sat beneath the rock, enjoying the only thing we had left.
Except for being together.
ooOOoo
4am Writer is Kate Johnston’s blog; we follow each other’s blog. Thus it was on Tuesday that I came to read the following:
Foster’s Daily Democrat, our local newspaper, runs an annual holiday art and writing contest. It was open to all students from first grade through high school in the seacoast area of New Hampshire and Maine. Over 2,000 students submitted entries. 34 winners were chosen for the art portion, and 36 winners were chosen for the writing portion.
My daughter was one of the winners for writing. Some of you may have seen my Facebook post about it, and a few people had requested to read her story. While her short story was published in the paper, it was in a special pull-out section that is not accessible on-line. So, I’m posting it here.
Merry Christmas!
Now that you have read Madeleine Johnston’s short story you can see why I asked her permission to republish it here on Learning from Dogs.
Learning from Dogs 