Fawns, Antlers, and Cranefly Sex

The season of the red deer with us imperceptibly becomes the season of fawns, which is equivalent to the season of new antlers, which--and we just learned this--is co-temporary with the season of cranefly-sex-in-your-face-on-your-frontdoor. But we're fine with that: everybody needs somebody sometime.

You can also see here evidence of the continuing benefits of Alison's dowry. No matter where I go--whether jogging on our trails, mowing, cutting and stacking dead elms or fallen aspens, or slogging through the marsh--Puppy Wuppy is always there, generally maintaining a respectful and clearly genetically programmed distance just off my left heel, but occasionally she has to sprint ahead sixty or seventy yards just to keep the cobwebs from forming. When we scatter the deer, however, she always sticks close: all adventure gone.

Two of the photos above I include because they show a mystery object. It's long and roughly cylindrical, appearing on the right just entering or leaving the tall grasses. There were three photos in a sequence, one before the object's appearance, one showing the object, and one after its disappearance. Unfortunately, the resolution of the camera is not high enough to zoom in to good effect. Through the process of elimination, however, I can only conclude that it is . . . something I've never seen before?

The electric company this week sent out their tree-decimating machine to remove a cherry tree that was growing into their power line on the front of our property. So now there's a little cherry wood that I have to decide what to do with (burning it in the wood stove seems somehow disrespectful and ungrateful), but what I really want to know is how that utility pole and that glacial boulder got so close together. There was no electricity this far out when the glacier was melting, so the rock had to be in place before the erection crew brought the pole out. And there's no evidence in the soil around the rock that it has been moved in the modern era. It's a fairly heavy boulder; when we had the driveway re-done two years ago, I asked the man with the bulldozer to move it, but his Caterpillar failed to budge it. So: another mystery.

Two young raccoons appeared last evening, sticking very close together. The dog ran out at them barking, circling them, but because they didn't run, nothing much happened. The dog was clearly disappointed, not programmed to expect so negligible a response to her fierceness. The pair of siblings came back after dark, muttering actively outside our bedroom window, and wandering around in the firewood that Alison has yet to stack.

Alison's dad's surgery approaches, and despite all the minutiae of our lives here, his is our big reality.