![]() ![]() Sixty swervy, curvy (“If you’d sit up and look at the scenery you wouldn’t get sick!”) miles that seem to follow every bend in the Umpqua River. Stump Lake is about 60 miles from where we lived. Since the trees there like to get together as forests and the forests are in the mountains and the mountains are often far from home and work starts early in the morning, sometimes it makes sense for loggers to temporarily live closer to the job. I almost went to Stump Lake and 1969.ĭetails of The Wednesday Witch don’t matter nearly as much as where I was when I read it. In the bottom, I discovered a copy of The Wednesday Witch. Last time we were together, she handed me a box of things she had collected for me. She will use a special occasion as an excuse to give gifts if she needs to, but she doesn’t depend on them. I don’t know why the tuna stuck with me for over 45 years. I remembered that there is a witch (the title helps tremendously), that the witch’s cat gets left with a little girl, that the witch rides a vacuum cleaner instead of a broom, and that the girl feeds the cat canned tuna fish. I assume, then, that it was the summer either before or after the second grade. One of her books that I read and loved was The Wednesday Witch by Ruth Chew.įor years, I had no reference points to help me remember how old I was when I read the book, but now it’s easy to find that it was published in 1969. I would read all of my books and as many of Kathy’s as I was able. We have both loved books for as long as we can remember, and we loved getting books from the Scholastic Book Club in grade school whenever we had a quarter or two. My sister Kathy is three years older than I. Mmm, Oregon cow pasture! Most recently, though, I experienced this transport not with a smell, but with a book. This summer it was the mint in my garden. “I don’t do this just for me but for everyone out there.I could almost believe a whiff of certain smells, caught just right, has the power to physically transport me to another time or place. “I will have to be dead to stop creating plants,” he said. “They have a long history of growing and promoting a wide range of plants for the Midwest and understand our challenges.”Īt 73, Joe Braeu cannot see a time when he will give up broom hunting. “Their collective plant knowledge has been extremely helpful at the gardens,” said Mark Dwyer, director of horticulture. “‘This IS an emergency.’”Īfter moving to Janesville, Joe and Debbie Braeu did not take long to get involved at Rotary Gardens. “I replied, ‘My husband is a horticulturist,’” Debbie Braeu said. The officer informed her that stopping on a freeway is dangerous and should be done only in emergencies. ![]() “I looked up, and there was a highway patrol pulling up behind me.” “We were once on an interstate, and I was waiting as Joe checked out a broom in a red pine,” Debbie Braeu said. Sometimes, he chooses a name that reflects a plant’s origin.ĭebbie Braeu told the story of one planted they called “Highway Patrol.” Propagating a new species gives him naming rights, and he has named several trees after family members. “I used all my ingenuity,” Joe Braeu said, smiling. Then, he wove the pole back through the branches and managed to topple the broom. That’s when he shot the broom with his rifle and brought it down only a foot.Įventually, Joe Braeu found an alder branch and squeezed it into the hole of his broken pole. He pushed his 40-foot pole through the tamarack limbs until the top section of the pole broke off and crashed down. “Everything wrong happened that could,” he recalled. Joe Braeu told the story of a broom 40 feet high in a tamarack tree in the wilds of northern Minnesota. If all else fails, he shoots the broom out of the tree. He carries a long pole, a saw and ax and a. ![]() Ideally, Joe Braeu searches for brooms low in the tree so he can knock down pieces or reach them with a saw. The best time of the year to look for brooms is after the leaves have fallen. ![]()
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