the_wood Fido Staring deep into the wood I strain to hear its name - But in the silence I sense its violence And its phrases ring the same Enter thee and slave to me Your offspring will all be free. 100821 ... unhinged i just realized that my life has been tied up in it. wood. my father was a firefighter for 30 years. for awhile, one of the older guys at the station refurbished antiques as his second job and him and my dad would refinish furniture in the garage together when all the work around the station was done, waiting for the phone to ring. his grandfather made a bookcase that was in our house, now in my apartment. my dad would build the evening campfires when we rented a cabin at atwood lake when i was young. he taught me what wood to burn, how to stack it, how to put it out. (the other night my friend was trying to build a fire and stacked up too many 2x4s so that they were just smoldering; i tried to tell her to take most of the bigger ones off til one really caught but she didn't want to hear it. we sat in front of embers instead of flames *shrugs* ) i have played the violin for 20 years in october. the smell, feel, sound of it. it's so much a part of me i don't really have words for it. odd, i know. unhinged doesn't have words for something. i guess that's why i've been enchanted with music for so long. communication without words. in the age of plastic, electronics, digital everything, there is something awesome (literally) about holding something that used to be living and making it sing, shaping it into something, polishing, caring for, loving, passing down through generations of a family, not throwing away, lasting. 100821 ... unhinged i still have that bookcase and this fall is my 31st anniversary with my violin 211008 ... tender square serendipity strikes again—i've been meaning to blathe about this same topic. for each wedding anniversary, michael and i follow the traditional list of gifts and give ourselves something as a couple that we will get great use out of. for instance: year 1 - paper. (i can't remember what we did for this exactly; it may have been a wedding album i designed) year 2 - cotton. we bought new bedsheets we sorely needed. year 3 - leather. we found a vintage chair and ottoman from a local thrift store and bought it for the house. year 4 - fruit and flowers. (i can't remember what we did for this one either; my memory escapes me). the traditional gift for year 5 is wood. originally, we had been talking about having our backyard fenced, which would have been the gift, but neither one of us has really done any work to make that happen. the other day, it dawned on me that a house in windsor is the true gift we're been waiting on because of all the wood framing that goes into making a home. 211008 ... unhinged now i am so in love with the forest and all the magnificent trees in this region that 'wood' is the dead parts of an amazing being that can last seven to ten times longer than a human and shape whole ecosystems. literally hugs her favorite trees 211009 ... tender square coming back to say how much i loved your post here, unhinged, with all it's lovely descriptions of wood and how that material has carried you through your life. 211009 what's it to you? who go blather from