One night while Caleb and Owen were  sleeping, some goblins sneaked into the dark dungeon ‘s cave and grabbed Deirdre and sneaked away. When Caleb and Owen woke up, they forgot about Dierdre because they heard noises outside the cave. They poked there heads out of the cave and saw two orcs talking to each other. So they both picked up a rock each, and knocked the orcs out with them, and stabbed them dead with there own weapons. Then they set off to look for Deidre. As They went along, They saw a house that had a sign near it that said ‘Eat free candy Here and sometimes gain powers.’ So they went up to the candy shop and knocked on the door. A little rabbit poked his head out the window and asked them what kind of candy they wanted. (Caleb and Owen were very young, so a talking rabbit didn’t seem strange to them.)Owen said, “We don’t want any candy, little rabbit. (witch was not quite true) “We just want to find our sister Dierdre.” The little rabbit, seeming to know a lot, replied, “You won’t find Deirdre, she will just turn up sometime. One thing you should know, my boy, is that not all goblins are bad.”

“So  what?  We’re going home!” said Owen and he started to walk away. “You don’t have a home!” the little rabbit yelled after them. “So what, we’ll build one!” Owen yelled back. And the next day they set out in search for something to cut trees down with. While the were walking along, they came to the town the orcs chased them out of. The only building that was left standing was a tavern, witch the orcs didn’t want to destroy because it had lots of food in it. So Owen and Caleb Walked right in and made themselves at home.

Maybe even a year later, Owen and Caleb decided to go out and fight the orcs. They had found some weapons lying around the tavern, and they set off in the direction of spider mountain. While they were walking along, Some goblins jumped out of the trees and started whacking Owen and Caleb on the feet with there hammers (The Goblins that we made are very small.)

Episode 1 Once upon a time there where two little boys named Owen and Caleb. Owen was the eldest, and Caleb was the younger of the two.  Owen was quite strong especially for only the age of six. He could out wrestle any little boy in the town. Caleb was quite intelligent for the age of 3 and he was really interested in his dads job as a black smith. Their mother was a Spell caster and she was about to have another baby when the orcs ( who had been conquering the humans) made a full fledge attack at the town (witch was known for its mighty warriors.) Their dad went to A different town for help, but on the way he got gobbled up by an enferned scroy hardhead. Typical. (scroy hardheads are nice, smart beasts. They are the size of an average room, they are smarter than humans. They only eat kodo beasts unless they are enferned. Enferning is what things called fernys do to most animals (fernys are orcish like creatures that come back to life when they die.) Enferning makes the victim nasty, evil, reckless, rash, extra big, and pretty much insane.)

Then their mother had her baby just as the orcs broke the towns’ barricades. Once She healed herself, she gave her spell book and her baby (Dierdre) to Owen and Caleb and told them to run to the nearest cave. Little Owen and Caleb scurried out their secret passage that led to the base of eye patch Mountain, and then they went into a cave. That cave happened to be populated by (Mischief  making)  Dark dungeons. Dark dungeons, as I called them when I was about six, are large, furry, eight-foot tall human shaped beasts. And ‘Mischief’ making ones are ones that ran away from there kingdom when they were babies. And as I was saying, Owen and Caleb entered the cave, put Deirdre down on a pile of clothes and fell asleep (for they were quite tired, being little kids.)

And then, in the middle of the night, a dark dungeon tip-toed out of the darkness and placed a huge bag of meat, bread, cheese, and a glob of mushed up mix of them all for Deirdre beside Owen. When They woke up, they thought the food was food there mom packed for them. So they gobbled down the food not in the least bit disturbed. The End! (of Episode 1)

Don’t worry! That was only Episode 1 of book 1. Later it gets more interesting.

It was much more pleasant up in the woods than I thought it was going to be. I had forgotten that now that the trees are leafed out, it is actually shady in some parts of the woods.

I was struck by how overwhelminly summer-ish it felt up there. I have been going up in the woods pretty regularly, watching as spring progresses. It seems it’s only been a few days since I last went up there, and in that time the scenery has transformed from spring to summer.

One of the most noticeable way that it looks like summer is that it’s very green up there now!

Originally, Owen, Caleb, and Deirdre all wanted to go up in the woods with me. But, in the end, only Caleb followed me up in the woods. All three of them seem to have radar for noticing when I’m going up in the woods, although especially Deirdre. Owen and Caleb always ask me, "Whacha doin’, Cadie?" whenever I start walking up the hill, even though 99% of the time I’m going up in the woods, so they shouldn’t have to ask. Then sometimes they want to tag along.

Deirdre, on the other hand, makes sure she knows when I’m going up in the woods. She always senses when there’s the slightest hint of "Going-somewhere" in the air about me. Then she immediately starts saying, "I want to go up in the woods with you too, Cadie! Are you going up in the woods?" and repeating this, to make sure she doesn’t get left out. She said this to me when I was pacing around the driveway once, cooling down after exercising, because it looked like I might be getting ready to go somewhere. She says it to me sometimes when I’m getting ready to go to Mrs. B’s, my neighbor’s, to do artwork. But most of the time, she’s correct–she spots my binoculars and is onto me.

This time, when Deirdre saw me, Mom satiated her by telling her she’d take her on a walk in the Secret Garden. I normally don’t mind taking Deirdre up in the woods–in fact I often like taking her and the little kids up in the woods. But I was grateful for Mom’s offer, because this time I didn’t want Deirdre to make me take longer.

When Owen heard that I was going up in the woods, he made a comic-character face of elation. He disappeared off somewhere, and soon was by my side again with all his going-up in the woods gear: a baseball cap and a pouch around his waist. "I’m bringing along my pouch, so I can pick things up and put them in!" he said.

We went the Secret Garden way, since it was shadier. I had brought along my new digital camera, just in case there were any good picture oppurtunities. I didn’t really expect there would be, since the hot sun would create glare. All my pictures, I felt, would be boring now that spring is past.

But as soon as I got into the secret garden, I noticed Mom and Deirdre walking together could make a good picture. In fact, there actually were picture oppurtunities all around me. Things that would just look like the same picture I’ve taken a million times before with the old camera could look different with this new camera. From looking at the little monitor screen on the camera, which displayed the pictures after I took them, I could already tell the pictures looked stunning compared to our old camera.

So I clicked away, while Owen very slowly walked along ahead of me. Caleb was tromping along ahead without any hesitation, but Owen was half-heartedly waiting for me. I caught up with him a little while later and confessed to him, "I’m taking too many pictures." (After all, the whole reason I didn’t want Deirdre to come was because she’d make it take too long!)

"Ah, I was wondering what was making you take so long!" he said.

Caleb kept saying, "Wow, look at these flowers!", because there were so many wild geraniums. There were some here and there on the steep uphill part of the Secret Garden, where it is bordered by trees on the left-hand side, and beyond that the ground slopes downward into a sort of "ravine" where water trickles down. But once we crossed over the wooden plank, after which the stream is on your right-hand side and crab-apple trees are at your left, the geraniums were quite plentiful. Their pale purple blossoms made the otherwise rather overgrown scene look a lot nicer.

There was an especially lot when we got to the place where bushes crowd up close to the path on either side. Caleb yelled to Owen (who was now behind us), "There’s lots of these flowers here, Owen!" Owen came up and exclaimed, as if he hadn’t believed him, "Wow! There is a lot here!"
"Yup, that’s what I told you, Owen!" Caleb agreed. Caleb sat still so I could try to take a picture of him, while Owen pretended to primp himself up with them.

Caleb was the only one who continued to follow me as we plodded along through the rest of the Secret Garden, and then into the woods. Owen had slipped away at some point. Owen generally has a short attention span, and even if he might be really excited about something at one point, if something else catches his interest the next minute he’ll be onto that. When we were farther down the path, he had said, "Oh look! You could make houses here! I think I’d like to make a house here!", pointing to the right-hand side of the path. That was more interesting now than following two slow-pokes up in the woods.

As we progressed furthur along, Caleb started saying things like, "I hope Owen didn’t get lost." That brought to my mind how, just recently when I had gone up to the top of the woods, Owen came up after me and he kept saying, "I hope Caleb’s not getting lost." The difference was that what Owen said was much more likely, although he said it in a much more light-hearted way then Caleb; he was confident that Caleb would be shouting for us if he was.

I felt slightly guilty taking all the pictures I was taking, because I wasn’t putting very much effort into it. To get something r
eally good, you have to try really hard at it. But I was basically just taking pictures willy-nilly. Once we got up to the stone wall, I felt like I had more inspiration. This is one of my favorite places up in the woods–a most familiar place, that I go up to almost every time I’m up in the woods.

Two different views of the stone wall. Still not the greatest pictures, but it was fun experimenting. The last picture is the tree you see looking to one side (south–well, southeast actually) from the stone wall. If you mentally place yourself as sitting on the stone wall in the picture, then looking up and left, you’d see that tree. It was fun to watch the trees around the stone wall slowly leaf out in spring. This particular tree was by far the latest–you might even be able to tell from the picture that its leaves are still pretty new.

There were so many different things I wanted to take a picture of up here, Caleb started getting impatient. To him, the only thing worth taking a picture of is him making a face into the camera. (I did take a picture of that, to make him happy!) He rotated between saying "Oh wow, look at that!" (every time he said that, it made me think Owen should’ve come up, because for every one of Caleb’s "wow"’s Owen would’ve said two "WOW"s!)

This is one of the ferns up at the stone wall.

This camera does very good close-ups!

Caleb did keep noticing things he thought was cool–like a crowsfoot plant, which is plentiful. But in the in-between times, when he was just sitting on the stone wall, engulfed in the wide woods all around, he started to feel a tad uncomfortable. For all he knew, we could be in Kansas. "Cadie," he asked me, "Are we lost? Are we even on our property?"

That question caught me off guard, considering to me we were right at home. "No–of course we’re not lost!! I know exactly where we are."

"Uh," he said, taking that in. "You do?"

(I think he said that…it drives me crazy, however silly it might be, when I write that someone said something they might actually not have!) "Yeah! We’re not off our property–well, actually, the stone wall is a little bit off our property, I guess. But we’re not lost." I think to him to the two naturally went together; if you’re off your property, then you must be lost.

Even when I did agree to go down to the house, finally, I kept halting every couple of steps when I "saw" another good picture. "I’m trying to go down to the house, and you keep distracting me!" Caleb said. That amused me…gee, it sounded like a line I use on him a lot (at least the second part!)

Somehow, I managed to lose the binoculars. Right after we set off down the hill I realized my hands were strangely empty. We continued down to where the paths split (I thought maybe I left them there) and then I left Caleb there and ran up to see if I left it at the stone wall.

I almost thought I saw it in the distance once, and instictively I reached for my binoculars to get a better look. Then I realized what I had done, and mentally laughed at myself. Oh yeah, DUH!! I’m looking for the binoculars! They were nowhere to be seen, so I quickly ran down to Caleb before he could get nervous.

When I got down to the house, and Owen heard about it, he said, "Someday I’ll see a bear walking around in the woods with binoculars!" I thought that was funny–imagine a bear peeking up over some bushes to peer at you with your binoculars!

I did find them easily after supper, though. (Phewsh! They’re basically my binoculars now, but they’re technically Teman’s.)

Up to mid-calves in very, very wet snow.

In the middle of a wild pasture rose patch full of briars about 8 feet long.

I’m not wearing gloves, or even thick clothes (or a coat), and I am currently cutting through a briar the diameter of a dime with a not-as-sharp-as-it-could-be jack knife.

No, I don’t cut myself with the knife (I know you were thinking that), but it does get better. Having cut loose the briar from the rest of the plant, I try to pull out.  No, I don’t grab a handful of thorns; I’ve a bit more practice than that. But it is all snagged up with the rest of the plant, so I absent mindedly give it a nice jerk to set it free. And, of course, it does get pulled free, but in the process I shred my delicate, unprotected hands on nearby thorns.

"Owwwwwwww. . ."

Okay, now that I’ve presented myself as slightly less than a stunning intellectual, let me explain what I was up to today.

 I was harvesting material for basket making. This is the perfect time for harvesting basket making material, because all of the plants have just enough sap in them to make them flexible, but not so much grow that they begin breaking and snapping. And pasture roses make ideal material for basket making (not counting the thorns), as they are long, straight and without branches, very pliable, and as abundant as dandelions.

True, I’m not wearing jeans or other thick clothes, but, from past blackberrying experience, I’m going to get myself all cut up no matter what anyway. And since I only have a few hours of sunlight, I didn’t see the point in wasting time changing. True, I’m not wearing gloves, but I don’t like gloves. I like having my hands free and nimble, and another fifteen minutes I’ll be doing work I can’t do with gloves on–so there wasn’t much point in bringing up one more thing I could lose and forget. (Besides, the bleeding will stop in a few minutes.) And true, I don’t have a pair of pruners, but that’s because Mom’s using them! (The nerve! Using the pruners–pruners she bought herself, no less!) There were other pairs, but I knew they’d be dull, so I figured they’d probably be as much trouble as a knife. (I was wrong, by the way. Next time I’ll crush the life out of the brambles. You get to do less hand moving with pruners, so it’s easier to avoid scratching up your hands something terrible.)

You might hold that you would have to be half-crazy to deliberately walk into a rose patch full of briars bigger than yourself, but a lot of artists are half crazy. Okay, you might even hold that one has to be completely crazy to do that, but a lot of artists were completely crazy, too. And if you happen to hold that I don’t count as an artist, that’s okay. Let’s face facts–after being stuck a few months in a house with a dozen other people, I am totally crazy. Even crazier than deliberately walking into the briar patch, I’m even enjoying being in a briar patch! It’s the first day of March, and 60 degrees. I don’t care where I am, I am definetly enjoying 60 degrees. Even if I am almost knee deep in snow that is rapidly soaking my legs and freezing my toes.

Besides, this isn’t any old pasture rose patch. It’s a special pasture rose patch! In this patch, there are brambles that are about 8 feet long but still mostly pencil thin–usually when they get that long they get thick and woody. Even better than that, a lot of them have almost no thorns! Considering the patch is growing right in the middle of the stream it seems logical to conclude that the brambles were able to grow very quickly. Thus they managed to get very long without the width that comes with passage of time. I wonder if growing quickly means less thorns, as well, or if I’m just extremely lucky?

Anyway, back to my point about pasture roses being good for basket making. When I was first introduced to basket weaving, I used manufactured reed. This had only two problems. One, it looked like manufactured reed. Two, it was EXPENSIVE! Under the general guidelines of "If you can wrap it around your wrist, you can make a basket with it," I set out to look at the back acreage. My first "natural" basket was made out of red osier dogwood. Red osier dogwood is a dream to work with. It sends up lots of shoots from the ground that are the perfect width and length to work with, and it’s bark is a beautiful dark red color (it dries even darker, more of a burgundy than a red). It is smooth, and generally good natured and complacent. Problem is, it’s a lot less abundant than the pasture roses!

Mom said at one point the government was actually recommending that farmers plant pasture roses as natural fences. Since then, it’s been discovered that it is extremely invasive and hard to kill. This allows you to be very brutal in your harvesting methods without the least bit of worry about what kind of damage you might be doing to the plant. Even if, by some chance, you mangaged to kill it, there would still be an easy 14,098 plants left on the property, so who cares? It also has a reddish bark, but it is darker than the red osier dogwood. And, like the dogwood, it dries even darker. Unlike the dogwood, it can get a lot longer and still not be too thick, so it is a good matieral for making big baskets. Also unlike the dogwood, it is NOT pleasant to work with. Even besides the thorns, it is always wild and unruly, with a life of it’s own. The thorns, though they make life unpleasant during harvest, aren’t actually that hard to deal with. I’ve seen thorn-strippers being sold, but as far as I can tell these strippers would also damaged the beautiful bark. So I snap them off by hand. Everytime I say that, it makes people gasp, but it’s really neither hard nor painful. If you push against the flat, smooth side of the thorn, they usually come off with only a small amount of pressure. After de-thorning a large amount of brambles, your thumb is apt to get a bit sore but that’s all. You don’t have the blood-drawing, skin-ripping problems that you do during harvest. (I really ought wear gloves, but I can’t be bothered, in the same way that I can’t be bothered to set a timer and therefore have burned or nearly burned several batches of bread.)

Having harvested and de-thorned a decent handful of briars, the fun really begins! (Really.) Now I get to actually start on the basket itself. This is where I really see the difference between making baskets out of manufactured material and wild material. When you make a basket out of manufactured stuff, you plan. You figure out how much reed you will need, and buy and soak accordingly. You figure out how many spokes you need, and exactly how you’re going to make the basket. With wild materials, your plans are just as unpredicatable as the materials you’re using. You can start out with a general shape or size in your mind, but after that, it’s anybody’s guess. The brambles can’t bend that way, or they’re too small, or they just plain old decide they don’t want to do what you want them to do. They brambles start out large and get smaller (unlike manufactured reeds, which are uniform in width), so no matter what you do, you’re going to wind up with a lop-sided, irregular, oddly leaning basket. Which, if you like manufactured things, straight lines, and prestine patterns, is a problem. If you like rocks and trees and hills and garlic, there’s nothing wrong at all with this. Garlic looks completely at home in my lop-sided, leaning, irregular red osier dogwood basket. With the certain gaurentee that it is going to look lopsided, leaning and irregular (in short, look wild), you are totally free from worrying about screwing up. No one is ever going to be able to tell whether it was a mistake you made, or the wildness of the material.

Realizing these two things–that wild material is unpredictable, and because of that unpredictablity no one will be able to see if anything goes wrong–I’ve never made a wi
ld basket with a plan of what I’m doing. I can see how this would be very frustrating for some people, but I find it exciting. Today, I knew I wanted to make a large bowl shaped basket, and no more. The base that I’ve been making is one I’ve never seen described in any basket making book, but I like it. The spokes for the side are first woven into the twisted circle that is the base of the basket. The longs skinny ends got woven into a ring within that circle, making an open, yet strong bottom. The thicker end of the spokes continue up to the the upper rim of the basket. What happens next, I’m not quite sure. I’ve made mistakes already, using rare brambles that would have made excellent weavers into spokes, but I’m not worried. No one will be able to tell–I almost have a blank check promising me a good looking basket no matter how hard I try to screw it up. This makes it worry-free work, and it’s impossible not to enjoy it.

The only frustrating thing is having to stop. My feet really are freezing, and the sun is going down. I’m too cold to work sensibly, so I do have to quit and go down to the house. But my mind keeps churning over what to do next, till I’m unbearably impatient for the next day so I can get some more time working on it. It’s like being a little kid the night before your birthday. You don’t know what you’re going to get but you know it’s going to be something good.
 

The original plan was for me to go outside and take a walk in the woods, taking pictures along the way. As it turned out, it was quite a feat just to walk up our hill! The snow was very hard to walk through, because besides being deep, the top layer of it had frozen over.

You could almost walk on top of it. At first the snow broke apart like ice when I walked on it, but then as it got deeper, I’d sink down through the snow suddenly every now and again, all eighteen inches of it. I never knew when it was going to happen, and it became like a game to try to stay on top of the snow as long as I could. Every time I went down, there was a delightful crumbling, sinking sensation. Then you had to pull your feet out of the deep caves they had made, hoist yourself up onto the snow, and continue to clamber clumsily up the hill–until you fell through again.

The pattern of the snow on the hill to my left (our main hill splits down into two side hills as it goes down) caught my eye. The snow was draped elegantly over a long hump on the hill, and the trees down by the empty pond where I was cast dramatic shadows on the hill. I was going to go up and try to take a picture of it, but the snow seemed determined to keep me from getting up there. It yanked at my feet, pulling me this way and that.

Then, when I got to the crest of the hill, there was a queer sensation of feeling like I was on the verge of falling backward down the hill! I felt very high up, as if I was on a platform, and I had to balance precariously to take a picture. I tried to take a picture of the little tree to my right, but just as I was about to, the snow yanked one foot down, so I was holding the camera crooked. I thought it was all very funny; the snow seemed to have a mind of its own, and almost angry I made it up the hill. The challenge made it fun in one way. The hill seemed to be laying there imperiously, daring anyone to come across it. But after a while, the constant falling through the snow started seeming grating, like an alarm-clock continually going off just when you’re about to fall asleep.

I stopped and looked at the scene around me halfway up the hill. The sun was on the verge of disappearing behind the hill opposite us, which made everything look especially dramatic. On that hill there was a pattern of deep blue shadows interjecting into the whiteness of the hill; streaks and splotches of it in some spots, and settling more heavily in pools of shadow in other spots.

But our hill was being lit up by the sun, and it looked broad and majestic. All across it was a sea of ripples in it that the wind had made, in an ever-continuing pattern, and here and there were pools of pearly-looking snow that gleamed in the sun. (I wasn’t sure what made the snow look different there; maybe the snow starting to melt there?) It looked graceful and eloquent, following all of the curves of the hill in one broad expanse of rippling snow. In one spot on the hill it rose up and down in waves.

I never did take my walk up in the woods. But even with all the struggle and hassle it took just to get up the hill, I was not sorry I came out.