News you won't see in controlled mainstream media.

---THE ETCHING~~
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-By: Barbara Baumgardner

~~I was barely eighteen when my future husband took me fishing from the banks of the Williamson River in Southern Oregon. We picnicked at Collier Park where he carved my initials deep into the bark of a birch tree. I took a photo for my album.

More than forty years later, I returned to Collier Park, a widow hungry for a hug from the past. The park had been expanded, lawn planted, and modern restrooms installed. Longingly, my eyes searched the numerous carvings chiseled into the bark of the only small grove of white trees on site. I photographed the trees from all sides, hoping one chance shot would show me some remaining record of the leafing out of love in this place.

I found the park host to ask for help. "Would the tree have grown too high for me to identify my initials?"

"Oh no," he replied. "But by now the injured bark would be healed and the carvings significantly stretched out as the tree grew so they'd be be pretty difficult to read."

Undaunted by his discouraging words, I stifled a couple of girlish giggles as my search continued for my very own 'tree-tattoo'. How ridiculous I must have looked pointing my camera at all the silent, jagged scars in the tree trunks.

-A poem crept into my mind:

'Forty-three years ago, my husband to be
carved my initials upon a tree.
Today I return to find his mark
in a lovely place named Collier Park.'

A week later when my roll of film was developed and I compared it with the forty-three year old photo, I knew I had found 'the etching'. It was the only double tree trunk in the small grove of now large birches. I laughed. And then I cried. And I remembered.

I suppose now, a generation later, those who play in the park might wonder about the origin of the etchings or perhaps chastise the person who used a sharp pocketknife to record his love for a young girl. However, for me, the deep scars in the tree trunk are a reminder of the scars in my own heart, put there by the sharp blade of death. And like the small grove of large birches, I too have been marvelously healed and stretched.~~~~
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'Enjoy the little things for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.'
--Robert Brault