I know you’ll enjoy meeting three class members who each applied their creative outlooks into projects.  Read on to meet Wenatchee Naturalists, Seiko Arakaki Betsy Dudash, and Julie Smith.

Seiko is spending her second year in the U.S. as an Au Pair, caring for a local child as she explores ecosystems beyond her home country of Bolivia.  She hand-painted a local forest scene onto a bowl and filled it with gilded cones from native conifers.

Here is her essay, titled Wonderland:  Once upon a time, there was a girl explorer and adventurer who came upon a wild place.  She had never before been anywhere like this before.  Big mountains and pine trees covered with snow, deer leaping beside a lake as blue as the sky, sockeye salmon swimming freely and Doulgas squirrels delighting in delicious nuts.  All of this was totally new for her.  She was amazed.  But she knew one day she would have to leave.  She will never forget this WONDERLAND.  

Julie Smith wrote and illustrated a personal narrative, The Gathering Tree, about a spruce tree viewed from her home’s picture window.  Year-round, the tree gives shelter, perch, shade, community, and peace to both birds and her family.

She concludes, “Native is Place.  Place is Community.  All are welcome.” View her presentation here. 

Betsy Dudash composed Strangers No More: A Wenatchee Valley Love Story, a prose poem and illustrated it with her own photos.  She is a newcomer to the Wenatchee Valley, humorously calling herself “A chlorophyll junkie in an alien landscape.”  She relocated from Indiana and sees herself as a “child of Lake Erie.”

Betsy begins her poem by saying, “I wandered your rocky trails, A stranger to your charms, Dazed by the unrelenting sun, Stunned by the browns and greys of your summer.”  She concludes, “We’ve shared such adventures this summer and fall; We’re no longer strangers this much is true!”