Some days you just need to take a break.  After filling and mailing the boxes yesterday, I was exhausted.   I’m not good at standing for really long periods of time, and that’s what filling and taping the boxes required.  I’m not whining, well trying not to whine, just saying how it is.    So I gave myself permission to watch it snow and hope some deer would wander by for dinner.  Have I mentioned the deer before?  Probably so, but I’ll talk about them again.  When I was a kid, my dad explained that if we don’t hunt the deer, they become over populated and starve to death.  That sentiment really stuck with me, and when I married a “city boy” who isn’t a hunter, we talked about the plight of the deer and how we could make a small difference for them.  Many years ago, I talked to a customer of the bank who was a farmer, and asked him where I could buy corn.  He said he could supply a ton of corn (literally, a ton), and we struck a deal that I would buy my corn from him.  So every year, the week before Thanksgiving, we load up the car with corn.  Ten bags of corn is a ton, in case you wondered.  We don’t feed the deer until the first ground cover of snow, then we keep feeding them until spring.  We’ve only had a couple of years where we’ve had so much snow, we’ve had to buy more.  Our “herd” can range up to twenty five deer, and they come all times of the day and night.  Lately, they’ve been coming in the middle of the night, and I think it’s because Honey still barks when she sees them.  She’s never allowed anywhere near them, but we have a room that’s mostly windows, and the dogs and I spend a lot of time there.   I think it’s like watching television for them, as they sit and watch the wildlife in our back yard.  The other dogs know not to bark at the animals, because the animals run away, and they lose whatever they were “watching on tv.”

For the most part, our deer are not skinny, and that makes us feel like we are doing a good thing.  I remember telling someone we would be feeding deer, and they said, “Once you feed them, you can’t stop, as they rely on that food source.”  I’ve never heard a statement that is more true.  As soon as the food is there, so are the deer.  I used to worry about them getting hit by cars, but they seem to know where the road is, and come out of the woods behind our house, roam around our yard, and go back into the woods.  They don’t travel in the direction of the road, and I’m relieved that they don’t.  So that’s my deer story, and I know they carry deer ticks and other diseases, but as I said, we don’t allow our dogs anywhere near where the deer are, and we’ve been feeding them for at least fifteen years.

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