More Appalachian Living

Bimbo, Bambi, and Clueless.  These are the names of this year’s lovely spotted fawns that gambol about in our “meadow”.  The meadow is a ¼ acre area that I keep clear for my septic system.  It isn’t a lawn.

We live on a tract of land that borders the George Washington National Forest and our part might kindly be described as “Scruffy Appalachian Forest”.  Our land may be scruffy, but Chris and I are hardly Snuffy Smiff and Loweezy.  We actually get up from snozzin’ by the stump and plant ornamentals and flowers to brighten our view.  Still, we grow almost all our vegetables in a fenced garden and we don’t do much “cityfied” stuff like shop in town and eat in restaurants.  In addition to our vegetables, my brother (when he was alive) and I,  killed, butchered, and ate quite a number of deer from this home place.  Often, they were harvested from within 200 feet of the house and garden.

Back in the 1990’s, there was a terrible over population of white tailed deer in our area.  They ate a browse line in the forest and in those inevitable bad years when the acorns didn’t fall, they ate just about everything they could reach.  Horticulturalists will tell you that deer don’t eat peonies, euonymus, and myrtle.  Forget that.

Well, the number of deer hunters has dropped by about 50% over the last few years and the deer are coming back gangbusters.  And now that I’ve not been hunting, it’s summer and I’m busy, the three fawns are eating everything and I can’t even get their attention.  I yell, wave my arms, tell them I’ll eat them, run at them (well, “run” is a relative term for me at this point).  But they just walk off a few paces, turn and look at me like I’m demented.  I can’t get them to care about my agenda at all.

Well the zucchinis are way, way ahead of me and so every day a few monsters end up on the compost pile.  They get eaten every night (we have a game cam).  So I guess that it’s all my fault.

Forget truth, beauty, justice and love; happiness comes from having someone to blame.  And if you can rationally and honestly, blame yourself; you should always be ecstatic.  I’m so happy!