Are you sitting comfortably, your screens switched off, waiting to discuss or ponder another prompt from my friend Tyrean Martinson’s book over dinner? Want me to start or finish with my take on it? Here you are!
I was probably around seven or eight when my grandparents took me and my family to a deer park in the Bergisches Land, Germany, a hilly and quite rural region in the central west with plenty of hiking opportunities. To me, a big-city child, it was a treat not just to see deer close up but even to be permitted to feed them. I’m not sure what we gave them – it must have been an extra-treat because the enclosures were huge, and there was lots of natural food available. But here they came, and the soft noses went straight for our flat hands holding out what, come to think of it, must have been pellets of some sorts.
Of course, I had seen wild deer a lot more often than this, but never this close. Usually, my mother was the first to spot them from the passenger seat of our car when we returned from a hiking outing in our state of Baden-Wuerttemberg. She knew that they were apt to emerge from the forests and start to graze in the meadows at the beginning of dusk. They were far in the distance, their brown hue melding with the color of meadows in the last of evening sunshine.
Consider my surprise when, at my husband’s and my first home in Steilacoom we spotted deer in our front and back yard! I had never thought that they might come so close to human habitats, and they seemed totally relaxed about it, at that. They usually fed of the raspberries that grew in abundance on the slope behind our house, then lay in the grass, chewing the cud. At one time, my husband found a tiny deer in the bamboo that was planted against our house. It hid away from the outside world and was utterly unaware that its back was leaning against the window of my husband’s basement workshop. It wasn’t even disturbed by him going about his usual crafting.
We also had some apple trees in our garden, old and gnarled ones that produced comparatively small but sweet red apples. As I have never been one to waste food, these apples got picked and also picked up out of the grass to make some wonderful, deeply pink apple sauce. So, alas, the deer had to go somewhere else for their pick of apples.
Every once in a while, when I’m volunteering as a docent at the Steilacoom Historical Museum, these days, there are deer entering the garden with its ancient (and partly replanted) orchard. I keep wondering if they are checking whether the apples are ripe already or whether they still enjoy the quiet of this lovingly kept place. The oldest tree is already full of apples ripening to a lovely red in the green foliage. Museum members are permitted to pick fruit from the ground and admonished to wash them thoroughly in an FDA-approved solution recipe of bleach and water.
The deer, of course, don’t know about the dangers of apples left to rot in the grass. Soon will be the days when they return to get their fill of Nathaniel Orr apples under the thinning canopy of the mighty trees. Or they go to other yards and find their fruit there. I’m always on the look-out for these gentle animals. Anywhere. Even in Lakewood we have them pretty much in our backyard. Although there are no apple trees. I wish there were.
