Heart To Heart

First published in the February 8 issue of The Oxford Journal by Sara Mattinson.

When my niece was four years old, she learned how to sign her name. She loved to draw so, suddenly, she was able to sign her name - Mimi - to every picture. She then went through a phase of drawing hearts on all her pictures.

At the same time, I read an elegant phrase about how the hoof prints of deer look like the hearts that young children draw. Although I can’t remember the author or the exact quote, this idea has stayed with me because a few days later, a picture arrived in the mail from Mimi, who lives in the southern United States. On the back, she’d signed her name and drawn a heart. A perfect hoof-shaped heart.

I’m not clever enough to explain what the deep, symbolic meaning of that could be but Mimi is seven now and I still have that picture. Perhaps the way it happened, the quote then the proof, made the connection indelible to me, for every time I see deer tracks in the field or on the lane behind our house, I search until I find the one that looks like my niece’s heart.

Tracks are easy to find in winter, the snow providing a blank canvas for deer and fox, rabbit and squirrel, crows and pheasants, and if very lucky, the wing tips of partridge. Sometimes I worry as I walk around our property with my head down, looking, that I am not paying attention, yet in truth, every sense is engaged. While my eyes scout for tracks, my ears are tuned to the call of a pileated woodpecker or the sound of water running under the snow or the whump-whump of  the wings of  crows cutting through cold morning air. My nose draws in the smells of frozen air and earth while my hands tingle from the cold. (The dogs love these walks because I pay no attention to them; they are free to follow a trail of rabbit tracks into the copse of poplar trees.) Every step makes me feel acutely alive and grateful to be in this place. 

A few years ago, just before moving here, I stepped out of a coffee shop with a large cappuccino in my hand. I took a sip then looked down at my topless beverage. The tilting action of my sip had caused the cinnamon and foamed milk to swirl into the shape of a heart. I stood in the parking lot, astounded and searching for someone, anyone, with whom to share it. It was a random occurrence, but part of me believes it was a simple affirmation of my decision to follow my heart.  

When I come across a line of heart-shaped hoofs in the snow, it reminds me of my (only) niece and how much I wish I could share these walks with her, show her the connection she created for me with the deer. Dropping to my knees, I deglove a hand to trace a finger in a perfectly-shaped hoof print, drawing a line from the deer through me into my niece, connecting us through the heart.

Deer In The Moonlight

The deer have found the carrots hidden in the garden. We didn't insulate them under straw to overwinter them; we simply never got around to eating them all, even with the rabbits, or tilling up the garden to rot until spring. Yet the carrots are frozen and buried under snow, and the deer have never bothered our vegetable garden before. 

There was one, a doe, standing in the garden when I arrived home from work, and two more, her old fawns, in the back field. They took off, but not in a great panic which is nice to see, the old girl picking her way slowly, without real concern, across the snowy field to catch up to her two offspring who had disappeared awhile ago into the woods. When I told my husband, he said they might return at night to feed again.

At midnight, under that great spotlight of a full moon, when the pup stirred, I got up to see if she needed to pee but no one was stirring in the dog bed by the time I reached it. Luckily for me. If I'd opened the sliding door to let the pup out, I would have disturbed the three deer standing in the garden munching carrots in the moonlight. 

I wonder why this winter, a mild and easy one, they found this buffet. Is it the only time we've left food on the earth's table? Or are they beginning to believe that they are truly safe in our backyard? My sleepy eyes were filled with loveliness and I returned to bed to dream about green grass and flowers. 

Good Morning For Some

The promised snowfall didn't happen, at least not in my neck of the northern woods, and the sun is shining and the air is crisp. A perfect fall day as we head into the last weekend of October.
Okay, maybe not perfect: Hunting season opens today so for the deer, it's a month of horror. I'm not a hunter and I have an aversion to killing anything that isn't a fly or an earwig. I can't imagine killing something as elegant as a buck or cutting up the body into pieces but I don't have a problem with killing an animal for food or to protect livestock (as beautiful as foxes are and as lovely as it is to watch them hunt in a field, protecting our chickens comes before a fox's life). Still, I don't like hunting season, don't like a lovely, lush summer coming to a deadly end right before the hardships of winter.
It likely doesn't help that I grew up watching Disney movies. Singing mice, dogs who are friends with foxes, an entire animal kingdom that talks, really. What's worse, my mother used to throw out one particular quote from one particular movie. I grew up hearing, "Mother, Mother, where are you? Your mother is dead, Bambi." I was 23 years old before I actually watched Bambi and my roommate came home to find me sobbing on the couch.
Egads. Who warped me more, Walt Disney or my own mother?