The deer are starting to eye the ripening apples on the ancient lichen-covered trees in our backyard. Sublimely indifferent to the construction of our house and so-called garden on what they have rightly regarded as their property since the retreat of the last ice sheet, they spend the summer sitting a few feet away from me top of the septic system mound, chewing their cuds with an orbital jaw motion similar to that of a major-league baseball player setting up to hawk a fat glob out into right field. Their smug expressions seem to say, “I wouldn’t plant that dahlia there if I were you.” I’ve begun my annual exercise of putting up coils of unsightly black netting around our trees to keep the bucks from shredding the bark with their antlers to mark their territories. Nothing detracts from a dewy late-summer morning quite like seeing a choice and expensive sapling that one had jauntily sped home with and laboriously planted by spending an entire afternoon with a pickaxe excavating a hole in the “soil”(a concrete-like matrix of clay and potato-sized rocks resembling a fossilized 1950s jello dessert) lying in a pile of splinters on the lawn. This misery is compounded by the lack of modern recourse, as the deer remain impervious to litigation, Facebook slander campaigns and angry letters to the editor. So netting it is. The only redeeming aspect of this chore is that when I emerge from crawling through the rosemary hedge I smell like a roast chicken, which in my mind is superior to Chanel No. 5.
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