Yesterday morning, as a gale force wind blew snow in all directions, I found myself out on top of a pile of a hundred bales of hay trying to rope down a couple of tarps to keep the hay dry. It was a good moment for me, because it represented the first time I had gone at some crazy farm job without hovering family members afraid I might flip over another wheelbarrow. For some reason, this made me think you all might think that I was quiet on the blog because of lingering arm issues.

The actual reason for fewer blogs is that I have had my nose buried in the Green Hope Farm Flower Essence Guide rewrite all fall, and when I lift my head from this, it is because I am working with Jessica, our new staff goddess, on designing new labels for all our Flower Essence collections.

The Guide rewrite is drawing to a close. I expect to get the document to the printer in early January. Information about all the collections is going in under the one roof of this book. The St. John Flower Essences, ALL the Irish Flower Essences, the new Camino Flower Essences and ALL the Desert Flower Essences will be included, as well as all the other collections that have long resided within its pages.

Opening a box from us won’t be quite the flurry of loose papers it has been in the last few years and hopefully the more compact literature in the book will mean less trees going into our materials.

Lots of the graphics in the Guide book will reflect Jessica’s work on our logos. We will mark each page of the Flower Essence description section of the Guide with the appropriate logo. We hope this will help everyone know where they are in the document. In general, I think it is going to be an easier guide to navigate ( yes, I know that is not hard to imagine). Jess has even talked me into things like putting the different collections in alphabetical order! As she simultaneously works with Ben to rebuild the web site, and bring order to my right brain guidebook, its hard not to miss how much better organized and easier to understand EVERYTHING is going to be thanks to Jessica.

Right now, I am going through the guidebook to proofread my revisions. It’s always a great moment when I feel that a rewritten definition of an Essence expresses the Flower Essence’s strength and glory better than my last attempt- and there are lots of revisions that I feel are wonderful improvements, mostly because I have found some ways to cut to the chase.

Sometimes as I revise, the Angels and Elementals bring me to tears with insights new to me. Yesterday for example, I was proofreading the Irish definitions and mentioned to the Irish Elementals that it was hard to miss their loving focus on the disenfranchised. They answered my musings with words that I quickly copied down to put in the Guide,

“ We do focus on helping the dismissed, disempowered, invisible, and downtrodden. Finding ourselves similarly ignored has been our lot in the post industrial world. Consequently, we bring particular empathy and support to those of you who find yourselves in similar straits. Our Flower Essence gifts reflect our reaching across the silence that has too long divided us from each other, to find again our kinship and communion in a natural world held in high esteem. Once human and elemental alike were a cherished part of all that. Once this was the greatness of this land. May such times live again.”

I also thought you might like another sneak peak at some of the new labels.

You have seen the Desert collection label before on the blog. It is a Claret Cup Cactus, a wonderful desert mandala in its own right. I love how the whole label echoes the colors of the deserts of the southwest. The center of the Flower is green and this seemed so wonderfully symbolic of the Desert Essences that bring everything back towards healing.

To the right is our Irish label. We tried many Irish Flowers before arriving at this label. Our attempts with Sea Campion were particularly earnest, but never led to anything that worked. When we tried Wild Fuschia, we loved the way it gave us an opportunity to bring in green, but not in a heavy handed way. We also love Wild Fuschia’s obvious joyfulness, as this is the way we feel about this collection.

Next comes the Camino label. This one took a lot of time and went through many revisions. We wanted to indicate the metaphor of the trail as the spiritual journey we ALL walk whether we get to the Camino in Spain or not. We found that when we designed a label that had the trail moving straight from foreground to horizon as it did during so much of Lizzy’s walk, there was a bleak quality to the image. Playing with the path dipping in and out of sight suggested the adventure of life much better. We also added the moon, stars, and the tower of a building in the background to deepen the image. The building in particular is meant to suggest how much of a role human community plays in our spiritual journeys and how this, along with the eternal verities, is a focus of these Essences.

Next to the Camino label is our label for the St. John collection. This was a hard label to do. We found that a lot of the Flowers we tried looked cliche. A bodacious babe sipping a pina colada while on spring break in Fort Lauderdale wasn’t quite the image we wanted to suggest. Eventually we settled on Madagascar Periwinkle for the Flower. We loved the way the colors of the whole label felt like tropical St. John and we felt that the power of this Flower Essence was a good representative for this great collection.

We decided to play around with our Animal Wellness Collection label while keeping it pretty close to the original. We tried various colors schemes, but chose this one as the freshest. Jessica had hope to make the dog look like her black lab, Brody, but when we made the dog black, it was impossible to see the face on the dog. Brody will just have to star in some other publication of ours!

The last label I have to share today ( there are actually four more, but I don’t have the right files to load them here) is the label for the Venus Garden Collection. This is a label of such incredible nuance thanks to Jess’s meticulous work on all the petals. The Flower is our much loved Mehera White Marigold. We think the label is elegant enough for this elegant powerhouse of a collection and of course, there is no Flower equal to Mehera!

Right now we wait for press proofs on these labels. We expect to have them aboard and in use at the beginning of January. We sent label queen Lynn home yesterday with the admonition to REST YOUR HANDS! She is going to be very busy come the new year!

Jess has built all these files in a format that means we can enlarge these labels to enormous banner size without pixilation- yet another phrase I never thought I would write- Anyways, we have had so many years of problems with labels, it is positively thrilling to have ones that I am confident will not give the printer nightmares!

Can’t wait to share all these and more with you dear people!

Long, long ago, my alter ego Rhino played a vital part in this blog. We saw him on safari in Africa. We saw him in Munich wrapped in a futbol scarf. We saw him frolicking in the turquoise seas of the Caribbean. But with Rhino, it wasn’t just about the jet setting. We also saw him fish the local goldfish watering holes and sun on the back porch like a normal rhino. Sometimes, we even got a candid as he relaxed between takes of his hit TV show, “It’s All About the Dishes”

But how many times can a sit com writer come up with a fresh script about a Rhino that does dishes? After just six episodes, Rhino’s TV show was cancelled by the Dish network and Rhino found himself back on the shelf, understandably a bit sulky that his fifteen minutes of fame was apparently up.

Recently though, his people came by with some new concepts. His press rep told me Rhino’s show had been picked up for another season. It had been retooled with a new, sexier name, “In the Suds.” A reborn Rhino was ready to re-negotiate a deal with me to be featured in the blog again.

Everything was set for Rhino’s return to blog fame when a major problem arose. With adult children and their friends filling the household over the long Thanksgiving break, Rhino watched a bit too much reality TV. I think it was maybe during a new episode of “The Hills” when Rhino set forth his deal breaker. He wants a soundtrack for his work on the blog. It wasn’t enough that his TV show had its own score. He wanted the music of undiscovered hip young bands for the blog soundtrack as well, and wouldn’t hear me out about how I hadn’t a clue how to discover hip new undiscovered bands.

We seemed, once more, at a stalemate.

But then, Thanksgiving dinner happened. Is there any meal more about dishes than Thanksgiving dinner? It was a perfect storm of greasy turkey pans, mash potato crusted bowls and epic stacks of dinner plates, desert plates, glasses, silverware, pots and pans. Rhino found his best self in that moment. He rolled up his sleeves and started washing, without a camera crew and without a sound track.

He did have some standards. Photo ops with him began only after the dishes were clean.

Here Rhino watches from out of sight as the turkey is transfered from one dish to another and then another. We felt it was important to keep the flame burning on the Thanksgiving theme of endless dishes as well as keep the stakes high for Rhino’s success at the post meal sink.

Ben out and out taunts Rhino with the challenge of the turkey roasting pan.

Several hundred dishes later, Rhino shows why his career as a soap and water star lives on.

Before I share some awesome shots of house demolition, I need to expiate my guilt by going over the factors behind our decision to wreck.

For three years, we tried to figure out how to salvage the unsalvageable. As I mentioned in my last post, we had pretty much everyone who has ever held a hammer in the region and many who have not, come through to give advice about whether we could save “Old Gray”.

As one person after another dug into the walls to examine the skeleton of the house to see if we could peel back to the bones and rebuild, it was hard to miss the fact that there was basically no skeleton. To give an example of the poor craftsmanship of this house, the 2″ x 6″ roof rafters were three feet on center. In our house our roof rafters are 2″ X 12″ and are a foot on center. Basically, what this skimpy building style meant was that when our friend Scot MacLeay put his excavator scoop on top of the roof of Old Gray, she quickly fell down.

And even as Scot worked to keep the floor intact during demolition so that he wouldn’t have to scoop up extra stuff from the basement, in the big part of the building, the floor immediately collapsed. Moments later, as rotten carpeting was removed, the floor was revealed to be made of something resembling thick cardboard, resting on collapsed punky cross beams held up by rotten logs in a swamp hole.

Perhaps I have indicated sufficiently why no one wanted to salvage anything from this house, even when everything was offered for free.

So, after three years of paying $3,000 taxes on a house no one could safely spend an hour in, let alone inhabit, it was time to let the whole thing be carted away by some nice guys wearing shirts that said RECYCLE on them. What exactly they meant by the phrase, we did not ask, though the amount of inspections and hoop jumping involved in getting permission to have these guys take the house away made it clear that it was all very legal, if also very sad that a whole house could be of such little value as to be destined for dumpsters.

The truth is, that while I thought I used clothe diapers on my four kids in order to keep our landfills emptier, I was really just saving space for Old Gray. As the house seems mostly to have been made of vermiculite insulation and paper wallboard, I hope it will compost down as well as those diapers would have. Maybe even better.

But let me leave wishful thinking behind to cheer you up with some action shots.

Scot’s first couple of swipes brought down one end of the building.

The white powder filling the air was ground paper used for insulation in the walls. It kept blowing in on Scot in his excavator, making for less than pleasant conditions.

Jim and Will left school during lunch hour to visit with Scot. Jim had considered spending a summer taking the place down stick by stick with help from Will. Here they agree what insanity that would have been. William wants me to point out the toilet holding strong on the second floor.

When Scot got down to the foundation, the nicest part of the building, he pulled out the rocks for us to reuse.

Within hours of demolition, local stone masons were at the site angling to buy the rocks, even going so far as taking pictures for their “files”. We politely declined all offers on the rocks as we do want to use them eventually for whatever happens here on this land in the future. Maybe one of our kids will build here someday? Plans for Ben to camp out in the place were mercifully scraped years ago when he got free housing with his teaching job.

In the meantime, I hope to plant the whole spot with flowering Thyme. It will be a gift to our bees and somehow feels like the right way to thank “Old Gray” for having been all that she could be.