Ever since we built our house in the woods, we’ve had a momma deer living on our property. And every fall a handsome young buck has visited her.
Now, those deer are not exactly an unmixed blessing in our lives. We haven’t been able to put in a vegetable garden because they come right up to the house and eat everything in sight, including the leaves off the grape growing next to the front door.
Back in the first year we lived here the deer hadn’t discovered us yet, so we put in a garden. But then the buck did discover us, and that freak not only ate the tops off all my huge, healthy tomato plants, when I netted them so he couldn’t eat them he walked on them instead.
One day that fall I looked out the front door, and there he was standing right smack dab in the middle of the path through my garden.
I threw open the door and ran at him shrieking in fury, “Get out of my garden! Get out! Get out!”
He stared at me for a moment, with his huge chest, black eyes, and extraordinary rack of antlers.
He lowered his head a bit.
Then, when I was about fifteen feet from him he turned and cantered slowly in to the woods, pausing once to look back as though he simply couldn’t believe his eyes.
I stood in the middle of my garden path panting in rage, staring him down. Later, when I told our logger about this, he said, “You know it’s rutting season. They get pretty feisty. I don’t think I’d run straight at any more bucks if I were you.”
So I didn’t (but I was still furious when the bear came through later and tore down our new fence and in the morning the deer had eaten all the leaves off my strawberry plants).
Then last Sunday morning my husband and I were sitting in our rocking chairs by the living room french doors, and he said suddenly, “Look.”
And out of the tall grass beyond the new deer fence came hopping a tiny, graceful, carefree little figure with spots all over it.
My husband got his camera and said, “There’ll be another,” and sure enough, about a minute later here came the other half of the matching pair, bouncing through the tall grass as though on springs. Bounce! Straight in the air. Boing!
And in that moment I saw myself perfectly clearly as the protagonist of my own story:
1. I need my beloved vegetable garden, upon which I lavish such intense work and care.
2. And I also need to be enchanted. . .by my nemesis.
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