,
\n02\/11\/2010 Wayne County Mail Newspaper
\n\tCornucopia
\n\tby Kate Chamberlin
\n \tCopyright \u00a92010 by Kate Chamberlin<\/p>\n
\u201cGreen Trillium\u201d to Benefit TrailWorks, Inc.<\/p>\n
It was a warm, sunny, Sunday one day in May when I harnessed up my guide dog and went on a wildflower hike with Mark De Cracker and about 20 other devotee hikers of TrailWorks, Inc. He didn\u2019t mention anything about tripping and stumbling through acres of corn field stubble to\u2026Well, maybe I should begin at the beginning.
\n As you may know, one of Mark\u2019s e-mail addresses is \u201cVideoMark\u201d, because he is rarely without a still or video camera. He takes them everywhere and shoots frames with the eye of an artist. One series he has is called \u201cThree Days in May, chronicling the lovely little wildflowers in the meadows, acid bog, and the drumlin woods. He did a presentation of \u201cThree Days in May\u201d to his mother\u2019s Col. Wm. Prescott Chapter of the NSDAR and I was there.
\n Now, as you may surmise, I am totally blind, so as each slide popped onto the screen, he explained the site to the group while a friend of mine tried to fill-in the picture for me. As I heard the descriptions, I found that my mind wandered back to the home my family lived in during my high school years. It was a large tract of land, sandwiched in-between the flood plains of the Des Planes River and Deerfield, IL. It was called Riverwoods and, although, the dirt roads were all named after liquors (I lived on Scotch Lane and my best friend lived on Sherry Lane.), the meadows, woods, and ditches were full of wildflowers.
\n I walked a mile just to get to my school bus stop\u2026well, no it wasn\u2019t up-hill both ways, I did have proper shoes, and my Mother would drive me during the winter months. The rest of the year, I went through the woodland paths with its Trillium, Jack-in-the-Pulpit, skunk cabbage, and a wonderful host of other spring, summer, and fall beauties. I could once again see their slender stalks, smell the fragrance of old decaying leaves and new life springing up, not to mention hearing the twitter-pated little birds, raucous caws of the crows. And, Occasionally, I\u2019d chew a snip of wild mint, just in case my favorite beau came by in his car to give me a ride.
\n The applause and chatter at the end of Mark\u2019s slide show, brought me abruptly back to the present. Mark asked me if I\u2019d write a script for \u201cThree Days in May\u2019, but I thought that if he had to sit down with me and describe each slide, why didn\u2019t he just do it himself. I suggested that I\u2019d be better suited to writing a children\u2019s story based on the slide\/lecture I\u2019d just heard, so that is what I did.
\n Mark kept encouraging me to join one of the TrailWorks\u2019 hiking treks to see the wildflowers in Wayne County. He forgot to mention the field of corn stubbles, but back to that in a minute.
\n Mark also runs a Bed and Breakfast named the Peppermint Cottage and one weekend a young couple from Finland spent their first wedding anniversary there. During their conversations, Mark found out that Mia Surakka was an artist and liked to draw nature. He put Mia and me in touch. My words became wonderful, colorful, and lively illustrations for our children\u2019s book \u201cGreen Trillium\u201d. She agreed, right from the beginning, that we would donate a portion of the royalties to some sort of nature preservation group, even though we didn\u2019t know which one it would be.
\n While we waited to find a publisher for \u201cGreen Trillium\u201d that sunny Sunday in early May happened. Once we were all gathered in Mark\u2019s driveway, we started off down the road to the now infamous field of corn stubble. At first my husband, my guide dog, and I were in the lead, then, person by person passed us by until we were literally \u201coutstanding in our field\u201d. We caught up to everyone else in a small meadow between the corn field and the woods we were about to enter. Mark made introductions and, unexpectedly I felt a hug and announcement about our book. I\u2019d never been introduced as an author before, so that felt quite nice\u2026and without further ado, we plunged into the woods.
\n The woodland path was narrow with tree roots humped up hear and there. Where we had to go single-file, my husband walked behind me and my guide dog did her best to keep me up-right and on the path. The adults and children in the group were patient and helpful. Once again I was smelling the fragrance of the woods and new, spring life forces. I was horrified when Mark came running back with a Squirrel Corn plant he\u2019d pulled up for me to feel, but he replanted it safely in the same place. I patted the fairly smooth Beech Tree trunk right down to its \u201celephant toes\u201d; noted the hollow tree where my story character got himself stuck; Laughed as two children painted each other with Blood Root a.k.a. \u201d Indian Paint\u201d; listened to the little birds twitter (mixed in with the sound of a tractor tilling a near-by field \u2013 hopefully that darn corn field.)
\n We gazed over the Golden Valley, Trillium Heaven, and marveled at nature\u2019s resiliency. I carefully knelt down (much to my guide dog\u2019s disapproval) to gently cup the leaves and blossom of a green trillium.
\n I am pleased to say that, in spite of the corn field, a portion of the royalties from \u201cGreen Trillium\u201d will be donated to Trailworks, Inc. \u201cGreen Trillium\u201d by Kate Chamberlin, illustrated by Mia Surakka is available from www.Trafford.com\/bookstore or phone: 1-888-232-4444. If you order a book, you can reduce the shipping charge by requesting \u201cUSPSMEDIA\u201d.
\n NOTE: Kate Chamberlin is also the author of \u201cThe Night Search\u201d, showing young Heather how valuable a tool her long. White cane is when she searches for her lost puppy at camp. Available from www.JasonandNordic.com; Phone 814-696-2920. A portion of these royalties are donated to Guiding Eyes for the Blind, a guide dog training center in Yorktown Heights, NY. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
, 02\/11\/2010 Wayne County Mail Newspaper Cornucopia by Kate Chamberlin Copyright \u00a92010 by Kate Chamberlin \u201cGreen Trillium\u201d to Benefit TrailWorks, Inc. It was a warm, sunny, Sunday one day in May when I harnessed up my guide dog and went on a wildflower hike with Mark De Cracker and about 20 other devotee hikers of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-99","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/katechamberlin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/katechamberlin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/katechamberlin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/katechamberlin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/katechamberlin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/katechamberlin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101,"href":"https:\/\/katechamberlin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions\/101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/katechamberlin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/katechamberlin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/katechamberlin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}