A hair above freezing with rain tapering off. Two skinny deer, still in their gray-brown winter pelts, pick their way through the sodden vegetation.
deer
Gray and still. A robin sings softly for a change. Two whitetails below my mother’s back porch bound up the hillside and out of sight.
Clear, cold (13F/-10C) and very quiet. Foraging deer have scraped a bare patch in the snow. A sliver of moon slips through the treetops.
Daybreak. A buck sniffing the ground for signs of estrus scratches his head with a back hoof. A mosquito sings into my ear.
Unseasonably warm with a lowering sky. A six-point buck emerges from the woods and struts over to the stream as a doe looks on.
Cold sunrise. The green hippogriff of a lilac just starting to yellow. Dry leaves whispering of deer in heat.
Overcast and cool. Two deer run into the woods as another snorts alarm up in the field. Another hummingbird buzzes me, ruby gorget ablaze.
Fog and mizzle. The usual doe and fawn graze in the springhouse meadow, their ears swivelling above the sodden vegetation.
A deer grazes a few feet away; I can hear blades of grass tearing. The sun almost breaks through a thin spot in the clouds.
Three squirrels are having a to-do on the porch as if I’m not here, running back and forth under my chair. A deer in the driveway turns her head to watch.
On a dark morning, fall colors that seemed bland yesterday are bright embers. Behind the still-green lilac, a deer’s pale legs.
Fog at sunrise. A doe leads her two grown fawns to the wild apple tree—an exuberant clatter of hooves.
Almost fall. The motherless fawn running out of the woods has lost its spots but not its cloud of flies.
This year for the first time deer have not eaten all the bracken in my yard. One frond is already yellowing like the skeleton of some unlikely fish.