Springwood

Verdant Haven realized that April marked a couple of important anniversaries for Forest. One of them was five years ago, so we decided to reflect on wood because it is the traditional gift for five year anniversaries. The results are below and we had a diverse range of written forms including haiku, prose, and concise thoughts.

Ruinenlust:
Echo of the past
In a terra cotta pot
Metasequoia

Edit: Holy Jupiter, it works in Latin too!

A praeteritō
In argillā urnā
Metasequoia

Now that's a haiku.

Uan aa Boa:
This is my body
which is felled for you. Take, build,
and remember me.

Selected by Frieden-und Freudenland:
From Mythologies by Roland Barthes

Toys

[...]

The bourgeois status of toys can be recognized not only in their forms, which are all functional, but also in their substances. Current toys are made of a graceless material, the product of chemistry, not of nature. Many are now moulded from complicated mixtures; the plastic material of which they are made has an appearance at once gross and hygienic, it destroys all the pleasure, the sweetness, the humanity of touch. A sign which fills one with consternation is the gradual disappearance of wood, in spite of its being an ideal material because of its firmness and its softness, and the natural warmth of its touch. Wood removes, from all the forms which it supports, the wounding quality of angles which are too sharp, the chemical coldness of metal. When the child handles it and knocks it, it neither vibrates nor grates, it has a sound at once muffled and sharp. It is a familiar and poetic substance, which does not sever the child from close contact with the tree, the table, the floor. Wood does not wound or break down; it does not shatter, it wears out, it can last a long time, live with the child, alter little by little the relations between the object and the hand. If it dies, it is in dwindling, not in swelling out like those mechanical toys which disappear behind the hernia of a broken spring. Wood makes essential objects, objects for all time. Yet there hardly remain any of these wooden toys from the Vosges, these fretwork farms with their animals, which were only possible, it is true, in the days of the craftsman. Henceforth, toys are chemical in substance and colour; their very material introduces one to a coenaesthesis of use, not pleasure. These toys die in fact very quickly, and once dead, they have no posthumous life for the child.

Feline Masters:
Neither scratching posts
Nor sofas give me more joy
Than clawing a tree

Verdant Haven:
I grew up in the Pacific Northwest of the US, in the State of Washington - aka "The Evergreen State." I've always loved being around trees of all kinds, and enjoyed experiencing the different smells, feels, and products their woods could produce. The smell of cedar, cut fresh, was beautiful, and you could light it directly with just a match when kindling a fire. Poplar, light weight but hard, perfect for a hundred duels with sticks, my brother and I, or the neighbor kids, constructing forts or brandishing "swords" from its branches. The sappy fir wood which, once it caught, would crackle and pop in the fireplace for hours, filling the nostrils with a pleasant sweet smoke if you took a whiff.

Our home was full of wood of various types. Polished cherry for the dining table and my mother's desk, a rock maple coffee table that I still have to this day, the ebony of the keys on the piano, hardwood floors that my dog's claws would make clicking noises on. A workshop in the basement where my dad taught me to use tools always had planks of interesting wood around, and reminded me of his father, my grandfather, who had a full professional wood shop in the basement of his small house, which he had built with his own hands prior to my father's birth up in Maine (another very tree-filled area!). On my shelves and in my closets I have toys made of wood, hand carved and shaped by my grandfather, including even a little wooden log truck carrying, of course, real (miniature) logs cut from an appropriate tree branch.

When I got married, our wedding registry was full of wooden housewares - bowls, cutting boards, serving trays - and every table at the reception had a large clean slice of pine in the middle, not just holding the centerpiece, but being a part of it itself. I store things in ornamental wooden boxes, stashed around our apartment, and dream of the shop I'll some day have in our future home, not because I'm a talented carpenter, but just because I love the smell and feel and the memory of the wood and woodworking there.

Wood is an amazing natural resource, and I've never found another that fills its place adequately in my aesthetic opinion. It's one of the few "design" or "fashion" things that really stirs strong opinions in me, and I think it's safe to say it's at the core of who I am.

Turbeaux:
My love cedarwood
makes the best pencils
and smells wonderful

Aclion:
Cedars are my favorite trees. Their wood smells super nice and it's lovely. It's an [absolute] bi[r]ch to work with though :c

Shwe Tu Colony:
A Doll & a doll are different, so thus is Dollmaking & dollmaking. The former creates indistinguishably sapient artificial beings (they have a different process when put under undue stress, but it's too impractical to actually happen), the latter creates just normal dolls. Most dollmakers in the Shwe world nowadays are golemancers overall, which means they're involved in processes of creating artificial, mechanical-based life, so you can expect most dollmakers to know how to fix up a golem as well. Now, a Dollmaker is someone specialized in working with Dolls, & is thus more knowledgeable in the sort of soul programming you'd need to perfect Dolls. In order from least to highest complexity, it'd go dollmakers that make just inanimate lifelike models; golemancers that can imbue such models with a degree of sentience & defined functon; & Dollmakers that create lives that resemble any other.
If one needs to differentiate between dollmaker & Dollmaker such as in a title, Đollmaker is typically used for the latter & Dollmaker plain can thus be used to indicate a dollmaker, & as just seen, italicizing like that would be used for this specific circumstance where one has to explain how titling with Dollmaker versus Đollmaker works, as Dollmaker without italics in any circumstance indicates the advanced sort. A similar rule applies with Đoll & Doll, but again, only for titles. Most linguistic historians pin this blame on Elijah Phee Loew, one of the premier Dollmakers of their world who had brought the concept of a Doll from his father's homeworld with the Five Fragrances Series. When he first created a soul-blending formula for his own Dolls based on the ones his father owned, he continued to call his creations Dolls, & eventually widespread usage caused the word doll to acquire two different meanings dependent sheerly on capitalization, though it is not all too essential anyway. Conversations typically differentiate based on context, & most will be able to differentiate it in the written word as well. Shwe dictionaries, typically being lowercase, have Doll & doll as separate entries, though ones that are all capitalized for whatever reason use the Đoll & Doll distinction.

Some languages do translate a distinction between Doll & doll, such as Demonish, which calls a doll "ci'daruk" & a Doll "ci'daruk-hon," meaning "breathing doll."

For example, if these were all titles for some sort of work:
The Dollmakers' Dolls: A normal dollmaker, normal dolls.
The Dollmakers' Đolls: A normal dollmaker, Dolls.
The Đollmakers' Dolls: An advanced Dollmaker, normal dolls.
The Đollmakers' Đolls: An advanced Dollmaker, Dolls.
The Dollmakers' Dolls: Incorrect formatting (it is clear this is a title, so one does not need to italicize).

...[T]he wood does have some bearing, typically based on the symbolism, historical usage of the wood, or its own characteristics — even well-established placebo or incomplete research can count (I'm mainly referencing sandwalwood's supposed healing scent, albeit with caution since we have a doctor here), though personal anecdote will not. As such, one can find certain cultural specialties within certain Dolls depending on what culture the Dollmaker was raised in, which may in turn affect their perception on their wood. If, for example, a Dollmaker associates oak with death, their Doll is likely to be finished with improved killing capability & a more morbid mind, whereas a Dollmaker in a culture that associates oak with protection will likely create a selfless paladin-like Doll. Skilled Dollmakers like Elijah Phee Loew are thus also somewhat knowledgeable in anthropology, in order to have as many connotations as possible to give to their Dolls.

Aside from wood, other Doll materials include fibers for cloth, multiversal fiber, clay, stone, & metal, but wood is still one of the more popular options since it often has the most moderate stats for a Doll & the subtle effects from the different wood types can often result in a greater specialization for a Doll. Normal fiber is typically reserved for flexible Dolls, multiversal is a forgotten technique for... reasons, clay is usually reserved for Dolls in danger of dying a lot or would like runes inscribed in them, stone is usually for stoic statue-like Dolls intended as decoration, & metal is usually used for combat-intended Dolls that need to take hits.

Wombazzia: A [w]ood I like to export is [m]ahogany[.]