Everyone -- or everyplace -- needs a guardian spirit.  Ours is Hoti, ugly but friendly.

You may -- or may not, if fortunate -- have seen some of the "Forest Faces" available in hardware stores.  If you haven't seen these, they're molded mouth, nose and eyes which can be mounted to tree trunks and, to be perfectly honest, some of these are not too bad in the right settings.

But I prefer originality -- as a great many of you already know -- so I started with a geoduck shell (one I had dug and eaten myself), some interesting driftwood pieces and patches of moss from local trees and stumps ... and they became Hoti, who looks after things here.  (He also, not unintentionally, looks very much like a geoduck: a.k.a. an elephant truck clam).

I'm thinking of giving him a friend this summer and will post additional pictures then.