New Year’s Healing Wreath

“Get those butts busy. Busy butts, busy butts,” I sang to the dogs as  I followed them around the yard with the pooper scooper.

It was a cold morning a little after 7am.  I was wearing my winter coat over one of Jon’s old red plaid flannel nightshirts, my red muck boots, a Peruvian winter hat and wool gloves. I like to pick up the dog poop before Bud gets a chance to eat it. Something he learned to do when he was starved for food in the outdoor pen he grew up in Arkansas.

As the dogs sniffed around I noticed the grapevine growing on the fence.  I had cut it in the summer to keep it from taking over but left it woven between the metal squares of the fence.  Now, as I kept one eye on the dogs, I pulled the vine breaking the tiny spirals that clung to the wire and freeing it.

Then I turned it in a circle wrapping it around itself.  Over the next few days, I’d collect greens from the farm.  Juniper, sage, rhododendron, and a little thyme.

The yellow berries grow on a thorny weed on a small section of pasture.  There was only one bunch of them, but the small red berries of the Rose Multiflora was plentiful.  The dried sedum was the last to grace the wreath.

Jon’s been taking pictures of the wreath as I’ve been filling in the leaves and flowers.  When he asked what I called the wreath, I had a quick answer, made up on the spot. “It’s a new year’s wreath, the year coming full circle.”

I finished the wreath today and hung it around our “Heal” sign on the back porch.

It seems to me just the right message for the new year.