We never know what we will see when we look out our windows. Around mid-day, Jim said, “I think there is a moose, or some big animal in the bushes next to our backyard.” Looking out the wavy glass panes that are the earmark of an ancient home like ours, I saw another “big animal right behind, heading in the same direction. It was a deer!
Funny, we almost never see deer during the day. They hung around in our yard quite awhile, eating fronds of dead foliage, and browsing the cedar trees that mark a pseudo boundary between our neighbor’s land and ours.
When I was about twelve years old, I lived on a farm in Deerfield, New Hampshire. My brother and I would get up early to see the large herd of deer that appeared just over the “rise” about 20 acres away from the kitchen of the farmhouse, on our land. In fact, when it came time to choose a gravestone for him, I chose that deer be inscribed on a black granite stone. It was a fitting image for someone who loved nature as much as he.
Today, one of the deer is limping badly. I don’t know how she incurred an injury, but after trying to scrounge for food in our yard, the two deer made it over to the neighbor’s field where they have been resting as silently as statues now, for hours, in the pale cold of a winter’s day. There is a coating of ice on the snow, making walking through it a difficult task for man or beast. We are keeping our eye on them, and hope for the best.
May we all survive this winter! The seed catalogs that have come in the mail give us hope for a brighter, warmer season.
Patricia Cummings
