SALEM — When you go by a home with a beautiful wreath on the front door do you ever think about what it took to make that wreath? Just ask a Salem woman who since she was 14 years old has made over 3,000 wreaths.

Rae-Lynn Jackson was hard at work this week at her parents' home in Salem making wreaths. For more than 30 years Jackson has been making wreaths for the Economic Ministry in Salem. "I was only 14 years old when I started to make 50 to 100 wreaths a year. By 2002 I was making 300 a year," she said.

"It's no easy job," said Jackson, who picks the tips off nearby land with permission from the landowner. "I gather the boughs in a grain sack, sometimes falling over the brush and have had a couple of black eyes. Jackson said she has actually gone out at 4 a.m. just to get the boughs to finish wreaths.

"I go back to the same location year after year. It's like pruning a tree, cutting the tips off and they come back better another year," she said.

Jackson makes four different size wreaths and this year will make custom wreaths out of hula-hoops, which are four to five feet wide and sell for $35 each all decorated.

Jackson also makes about 10 wreaths for the Salem cemetery which includes one for her late cousin Bruce Howard who was killed in 1983 in the military. Jackson also places one on the grave of a dear 14-

year-old former girlfriend, Wendy Libby, and one on her cousin, Richard Arms', little boy, Tim Arms, who passed away, all of Salem.

"I try to personalize each wreath," such as the one for her late husband, Scott Jackson, which features a deer. Jackson, who was 27 years old, died in a motorcycle accident in Embden in July of 1999.

"We were married for six wonderful years," said Jackson, who has a fiveyear old daughter, Mia- Rae Jackson, who attends the Kingfield Elementary School.

In 1995, said Jackson, she and her husband Scott went to truck driving school and drove as a husband and wife team all over the United States for a year. "It was hard working 18 hours a day and living in a truck, but we had wonderful memories."

On Scott Jackson's grave stone there is a replica of the trailer truck that they drove with the words, "Our miles together have ended but our memories will roll on forever."

Jackson, a 1982 graduate of Mt. Abram High School, has also worked for some 20 years off and on at Sugarloaf in food service along with driving trucks for Timber Express and Carrier Trucking. "I only worked summers for the trucking companies as I wasn't too good at putting chains on a log truck in the winter."

Making wreaths is what Jackson loves to do, "It's not a holiday if you don't make a wreath," said Jackson.