December days

It's hard to feel kindness toward an animal that destroys your newly established peach orchard and decimates your spring tulip collection. An animal who has no shame in eating new plantings in your carefully tended veggie patch and who loves to top it off with a dessert of newly ripened tomatoes. 

And yet...

We have had a steady trickle of visitors today. Deer. In the morning, just as I set out to feed the animals...'

Then again before lunch, this time two of them, completely at home here, even though it is midday -- not the typical hour of their hunt for food.

And they're thrilling to see, despite my antipathy toward their farmette raids.

It's a funny thing about emotion. You may not love an action, and yet you have love for the person or animal committing that act. So much am I in awe of the deer (their movements!), that I despise the hunting season, which, in Wisconsin is complicated: the regular old hunt ended on December 1st, but you can still go after deer with a muzzleloader (Ed explained that one to me... what a sport!) for a few more days, and you have even more time to take down deer with antlers (the proper nomenclature is "harvest" but I find that to be a horrible misappropriation). And you get an additional set of days for the antler hunt later on --  it's called the "holiday hunt" -- from Christmas Eve until January 1st. Such a weird thing: we tell our kids about the magic of Santa's sleigh, pulled by reindeer, and we go out and shoot the deer down for amusement's sake. Antlers and all. [And yes, I do understand that a deer hunt may actually be a good thing in terms of maintaining a healthy deer population. The fact that we so far have removed 189 000 deer from Wisconsin this year, makes for healthier stock in the remaining 1.6 million that inhabit our state, they say. I just do not get the fun of doing it.]

Breakfast, with Ed and somewhere in there we have a cat who enjoys torturing me with her request for a solid petting session just when I'm about to bite into a flaky (reheated) croissant.

The rest of the morning is rather sedentary. This is not a good thing, but countering the urge to stay put is hard when it's cold outside and so lovely in the living room, right before the Christmas tree.

At noon, I propose we walk, despite our lovely and very peaceful moments at home. We go to our local park. Yes, it's cold. The pond is frozen now.

 

But there is sunshine. This should be a lovely little hike. It's even climbing to almost freezing! A positively toasty noon hour. But somehow two topics swirl around us like hornets determined to unravel your inner peace: nuclear weapons and their current levels of sophistication (Ed's been reading up on this for who knows what reason and so he brings it up) and Hunter Biden (I'm responsible for that one, though I didn't quite realize it would spin in the direction that it did -- family relations in general. A positively heated conversation ensued!).

It's not that we disagree on either of those topics. But Ed and I do differ in the way we examine such issues. He does not tip toe around difficult ideas and conclusions. We end the walk less at peace than when we began, which is not the way it's supposed to work. As we drive home, Ed grows sweetly mellow. I take a little longer to get back on track. Maybe it's because my free hours are more precious and I hate for them to be anything less than sublime. Especially on a forest walk.

Grandkid pick up time. I feed them. We read, they play.

Just as the sun sets, I drop Snowdrop at her play rehearsal and return Sparrow to his dad. 

Home now. Beautiful, warm, sparkling with lights home. 

(Cats, knock it off! The tree is not a toy!)

Contentious walk long forgotten. I make a mushroom omelette, put together a salad. Ed asks -- what do you want to watch, gorgeous? 

We're set for an evening of pure contentment.

with love...