THE LITTLE BEAVER FESTIVAL THAT COULDN’T

May day. The day I promised we’d decide whether we would officially keep behaving like we were having a festival next month or not. Whether to keep arrangements for chairs and tables, exhibits, musicians and silent auction items or finally admit that this year, the thirteenth beaver festival, was not to be.

Yesterday I withdrew our grants to the city, the wildlife commission the community foundation. I wrote the musicians, the sound guy and the volunteers. The beaver festival will have to be like a hotel elevator with no thirteenth floor. We’ll continue on next year and I promise it will be better than ever, but this year, this one rotten year we’ll have to take a break,

I have been holding a beaver festival in the summer since Bush was president. Since Martinez had 9 beavers, Since I was working full time. I held a festival the year the beavers died, the year my father died, the year I was in the hospital with sepsis. Every year since 2008 But not this year.

We received such awesome donations to the auction this year, not the least of which was an original reed bed painting from Lizzie Harper of Wales that she did originally for an exhibit at the national gallery. I cannot believe how beautiful her work is, and we’ll save it for next auction. She was so kind also and I advised her to do more work with the Beaver Trust but to charge them because they could afford it. (Smile). She is so careful in her work you won’t believe it until you watch one of her videos of the process. She just dropped this video this morning of painting rose leaves. Go watch and be peaceful for a moment.

Well, I have the activity the cards and the spyglasses ready for next year. We have the prayer flags for painting. We have the beaver billboards from last year, the printed towels and Amy’s designs to look forward to. We’ll just have to shelter in place until that happy day.

The other day I talked with the Masters student from Humboldt researching the festival and got him in touch with some of our early supporters. The boy in this video is Noa who is now finishing his mathematics degree at UC Santa Barbara and was only too happy to talk to him. Watch it all and you feel so much better. There is nothing about this video that doesn’t remind me how I got on this journey and make me determined to continue onward next year.

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