Hello, Deer

For the pandemic, I have a desk in front of an upstairs window so that during videoconferences I don’t have shadowy Frankenstein eye hollows. I have a view of the back corner of my yard where four properties and three fences intersect. From this vantage point, I can see six rooftops through the leafless trees. In other words, I live in a dense suburb, not the country. In May I planted flowering annuals in that corner, and from June through November, deer touring the neighborhood availed themselves of nourishment.

In the early summer I worked revising my novel and blog posts on the back porch, and at first when a deer landed from an unseen direction, all I had to do was stand up, express my disapproval, and yank open the screen door to persuade the interloper to move on.

Deer have started to feel commonplace like squirrels, and before shooing one away, in the spirit of “Can you believe this?” I took her picture as she chomped on salmon-colored blooms. My uncle emailed, “Deer can also have gourmet taste.”

Later, the deer—the same one?—returned and snacked unperturbed at the sound of the screen door and my voice, leaving only when I traversed half the lawn in her direction. The nerve.

As fall approached, I migrated inside and turned to preparing for an online semester. My writing focus shifted to work email, course materials, and assignments for remote teaching. As I learned new technologies and how to make videos of my talking head, years of teaching experience gave way to feeling like a novice.

And when a doe would appear and gracefully lower her head into the flowers, I would be up at my desk on a Zoom call with students and not in a position to mute and turn off the camera to run down to the yard. I texted my husband working downstairs, A deer is in the yard!!! Are you free? Can you make it leave???

It.

I heard him open the screen door below, and next I saw her scale the fence.

I returned my gaze to my computer screen, my window to the world, to students trapped in stacks of video boxes, all of us figuring out how to survive in an unfamiliar environment.

Sometimes when the deer appeared, I was working offline, and I could raise the window to yell. She required me to come into the yard, however, to prove I was serious.

Every day of the pandemic, I have foraged for sustenance: humor, hope, work, connection, insight, a sense of progress somewhere.

In November, after a blasting frost, the annuals wilted. But deer will find something new to eat. I looked up to see her gazing in the direction of my window, waiting. I wrote disapprovingly on the glass with my pencil: thwack, thwack, thwack.

The sound travelled through the cold and her ear twitched. Interpretation.

Suddenly, it felt remarkable. Of course, I had communicated before, but this time, the way she twitched and waited made me feel our history. Still, I lifted the window, following my script, speaking a one-sentence tragedy. “Go away, beautiful girl!”

I find myself in a story with her, behind a window with my limited point of view. Yesterday, she visited the neighbor’s yard with three others. Two folded their legs and sank to the ground to rest. One seemed to tease and chase another, perhaps a moment of levity in an alien world.