When we moved into this house on these two acres fourteen years ago there were so many deer in the neighborhood one of the very first things we did was have a sturdy deer fence put in around one of our two acres so we could grow fruit and vegetables and roses. We left the other acre open to the deer and enjoyed the daily visits of several does and their offspring. In the fall, bucks would arrive to impregnate those does they could catch up with.
Our neighbor across the street fed the deer. He put out large quantities of feed (cob) for them every day and as a result he had a resident herd of eight to fifteen deer, depending on the survival rate of the fawns born that year. In drought years, the mountain lions would severely cull the herd and few fawns survived the summer. This herd of deer foraged for miles around here to supplement the food our neighbor fed them.
I think it fair to say our neighbor loved the deer he fed, though every year he traveled to Montana or Idaho for a month to hunt deer and elk, and he always killed a deer or two every year. Yet he never harmed the deer who hung around his house, and for generations depended on his feeding them for a large part of their daily food intake.
A few years ago our neighbor died and no one continued feeding the neighborhood deer. Within a couple months of our neighbor’s death, most of the herd had scattered and we only had three does and their progeny visiting our property. This year only a single doe and her two yearling offspring come by every few days to browse the acre of our property accessible to them.
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Today I’m going to plant potatoes in two of our orchard tubs. Our little deer-fenced orchard gets the most sun of any place on our property that is mostly surrounded by big redwoods. Had I known we’d have such a long run of sunny days this winter, I would have planted potatoes a couple weeks ago. With luck, we should be harvesting some nice spuds in April when I’ll be planting the annual crop of lettuce, chard, peas, beets (for the greens mainly), carrots, arugula; and in May a zucchini plant or two.
Growing potatoes is fun and easy, and digging up potatoes always reminds me of hunting for Easter eggs when I was a kid.
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I’m about to start narrating the audio book edition of a book I published in 2020. Oasis Tales of the Conjuror and other stories. I think it will make a wonderful addition to the nine other books of mine available from Audible/Amazon, yours truly the narrator of eight of those. I don’t have a large following of readers and listeners, but I enjoy making my work available to the larger world.
And soon I’ll be recording songs and music for a new album, always an exciting adventure for me.
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Here is an excerpt from an essay by Philip Whalen speaking about where his poems come from:
“Some poems arrive as dreams. Others begin from memories. Some start out in the middle of a conversation I’m involved in or words that I overhear other people speaking. An imagination of the life of some historical person may occur to me: I may suddenly suppose I understand what it felt like to be Johannes Brahms on a particular morning of his life. A landscape, a cat, a relative, a friend, a letter (or the act of answering a letter), walking, the unexpected receipt of a new poetry magazine full of work by new young writers, the arrival of a new book of poems by a friend or somebody I don’t know personally; re-reading Shakespeare or reading Emily Dickinson on the streetcar and suddenly moved to tears; shopping for vegetables, making love, looking at pictures, taking dope, sitting still and looking at whatever is happening in front of me, getting a haircut, being afraid of everybody and everything, hating everybody, playing music, going to parties, visiting relatives, riding in trains, buses, taxis, steamboats, riding horses, getting drunk, dancing, praying, practicing meditation, singing, rolling on the floor, losing my temper, looking for agates, arguing, washing sox, teaching, sweeping the floor, operating this typewriter right now (bought in Berkeley 12 years ago and wrote ten books on it) while the cicadas and taxis all sing in ravening hot Japanese summer 1967…all this is how to write, all this is where poems are to be found. Writing them is a delight.”
Fin
What You Do In Ireland piano solo from Todd’s album Nature of Love