Anyone who knows me knows how much I require being around trees. I remember when I transferred to Purdue starting the summer between my freshman and sophomore year of college. I had started at
Hanover College, a very pretty, 650 acre wooded campus but wanted to consider Speech and Hearing so off to Purdue I went. I know it wasn't the only reason I didn't stay there, but back then that campus had almost all of its trees shaved away, the town was ugly concrete, and I truly just couldn't handle the lack of nature in the environment. It cost me money, and set me back a bit in graduation time, but I didn't stay for the fall semester, scrambled to re-enroll at Hanover until I figured out what to do next. I had get back to the trees. I had spent most of my youth walking the woods around my folk's place, hiking at Clifty Falls Park and the State Hospital in Madison. I'm odd. I really need to be around trees. I transferred my junior year to Indiana University in Bloomington, and have been in this area ever since. This is an area where the people tend to honor trees, talk about them, fight for them if need be. I belong around an area like that.
Mark and I have 55 acres of woods. Hiking is something I do almost every day year round, and this is coming from someone who often works ten hour days. The forest and the outdoors are my sanity. They are what ground me.
We have quite a few pieces of stick furniture we have built and one of my favorite plant stands is a beech tree that frankly looks like a mans legs and crotch area. I will try to post a photo later. This entire blog post started because that plant stand came to mind after I saw a page titled
11 Trees That Look Like Genitals. I think they have cheated on one of them....its simply a picture turned upside down. But a few of them are pretty neat.
