Tomorrow night I’m going over to Cheney to kick off the first Read for Trees of the year. This one isn’t for a school or a library or a group like the Girl Scouts or Boys and Girls Club. This for a group of home schooled students. It will be interesting to see how the competition goes when the students do not meet together every school day. They will vote by putting colored slips of paper in one of my paper-mâché tree stumps. They’ll be choosing between a red oak, a really big tree, and a Japanese lilac tree, a small flowering tree. And the winner will be planted at a very interesting spot. The group is moving their meeting place to a new spot, a former missile silo site. In about six weeks I’ll get to see what it looks like.

I’ve been busy filling out donation forms for several auctions and hoping that I can get my mission across. I’m trying get the people running the auctions to put the tree in the live auction and let me get up and tell my story because I think I get the audience to want to plant this tree. Auctions let me do good things for each worthy cause and to do good things for the community by planting more trees. My three new, great sponsors have really helped this happen.

I just received an email from Walla Walla wanting to do a project with the Susie Forest. I’d better answer right away.