I didn’t want the dream to end. I was in Europe staring at pastries behind a glass window. However, each pastry, unlike the scrumptious eclairs shown below, was placed apart from each other (a good six inches I would guess) with a number in front of it.
I gathered one had to order the desired pastry by number only and then sit down in chairs that were lined up as if one were in the waiting room of a doctor’s office rather than a beautiful cafe. Was this a pandemic-related dream? The six inches (or six feet in real life) seemed plausible. And sitting in a doctor’s office (or at least wanting to) nibbling a sweet treat seemed to be entirely credible given the last eight weeks.
Lynn had hernia surgery in the beginning of May. It was supposed to be a routine outpatient procedure with little post-op complications. Except no one could be there with him. He would have to be dropped off at the hospital and I would have to wait for a phone call from the surgeon. What’s this have to do with deer you ask? (Note the title of this essay.) Nothing, except that up until this weekend, they were always pretty well behaved on our property.
Lynn had delayed having the surgery because he wasn’t in any pain. Plus, once we had started the ball rolling on this semi-elective “event,” we were told the procedure had to be postponed until a surgeon was available and everyone was vaccinated! We were okay with that. After all we have known each other a very long time (42 years actually) and agree on the important stuff. Besides, we love just being by ourselves. We also love cooking and growing our own food. We did hope, however, that the hernia (derived from the Latin word “rupture”) wouldn’t do just that before the operation was scheduled.
He was not good with anesthesia, albeit the last surgery he had was 28 years ago. He had been running through Penn Station trying to catch a Long Island Railroad train to get home to me. But he slipped, missed a step on the stairs to the platform, and fractured his ankle. Did he miss me that much to justify sprinting for the train? Perhaps. But in actuality, I was on bed rest for a pregnancy that could go bad at any given moment. He wanted to get home as soon as he could for both of us; everyone was on edge.
So, he, going into this new surgery, which had been delayed because of COVID, made us uneasy. Could I tell him I was more scared than nervous?
He wouldn’t wear a coat on the day of the procedure. “More stuff to carry,” he said. “Wear casual clothes” they told him. After being home since March 2020 what else was there to wear except sweatpants and a t-shirt?
“At least take a phone charger,” I said to him.
“No,” he countered.
I dropped him off at the hospital early (6:45 AM) but as mentioned, couldn’t go inside. He went in on his own and it reminded me of the first day we sent our son to preschool many years ago. Neither of them ever looked back at me or even waved.
I drove home and stared out our kitchen window. We have a lot of property and woods so I waited for our “resident” deer to come down the hill to give me a sign that everything would be okay. But they just walked right up to their usual spot – eating the grass and a dandelion or two for good measure. Thinking back on them now, I’m quite happy with their restraint.
They say most couples don’t talk about sex, death and money. Pretty funny since we talk about all three of those “taboo” topics frequently – sex and money more than death. Should death be at the top of my list to think about today, though?
I tried to read but since we had been up most of the night worrying about the outcome, my eyes refused to focus. I walked the rooms in our very large house and felt the quiet. Was I prepared for him not to return? I wasn’t. But knew instantly how it would feel if he didn’t come home. I summoned up an old metaphor thinking that the “silence was deafening.” I wanted to shout, “Yes, it is!”
I busied myself, texting our children, not revealing my fear. And then the doctor called. “He did okay,” he said. “Sorry there was a delay.” Turns out, this surgeon had not one but a few emergencies to deal with that Monday morning. I compared it to waiting on the tarmac at JFK. One is anxious for the flight to be airborne, for the trip or vacation to commence. Or, in this case, for the operation to be successfully completed and most importantly, for the patient to have a “smooth landing.”
I’m not religious and I don’t pray but I did look at the “bamboo” on our property which a local chef told me was actually Japanese knotweed. Their sturdy brown and green stalks were pushing through the soil up towards the sky. The chef told me that “their tender shoots are edible.” Suddenly, I, too, felt I was living up to a particular word that the New York Times had written about in describing certain feelings one has encountered in the past year. The word is “languishing,” which made me think; instead of my current state of inactivity, perhaps I should be outside chopping up some stalks and then brewing them into some sort of medicinal beverage to help him recover?
Finally, 12 hours later, I drove back to the hospital to pick him up. He was wheeled out in a wheelchair and looked even grayer than the t-shirt he was wearing. I helped him into the car and reached over to fasten his seat belt. I realized it was exactly the same way I used to buckle in our children when they were young.
“My phone is almost dead,” he said.
I didn’t want to say, “I told you so,” followed by “why didn’t you take the charger?”
Since then, he has been recovering slowly. No pain, but swelling was the primary culprit. He, who has always been the “lifter” of things in our relationship – whether it be bags of topsoil for our never ending gardening adventures or more and more lumber and moulding for house repairs – suddenly stopped lifting.
I would “grow” muscles I thought! I’d wheel out trash cans, carry out recycling bins, lawn furniture and even table saws! (Yes, we do in fact, have multiple saws.) Luckily, the deer decided not to invade our garden until he had healed sufficiently enough to help me try and remedy the problem.
If you recall my last post, I wrote fondly of the new fence we were planning to install because our old one was not only falling apart, but it was rusting and ugly. What we didn’t take into account when putting up our nicer, albeit shorter fence, was that deer can jump quite high to feast on whatever they think is tasty in your average vegetable garden.
We have lived in the Red House for 11 years and this is the first time we had deer be so bold. Around 8:45 on Friday night, we were alerted by a neighbor that a deer was in our garden. It was too dark by then to see what was consumed but in the morning we assessed the damage. Most of the tomato plants were gone, broccoli and Swiss chard, too. A rose bush that our daughter gave us a few years ago (and had a plethora of red roses blooming) was eaten down to the bottom. Ditto for the daylilies and the Stella d’Oro’s.
The lettuce was left mostly intact as were our peas and beans and anything that was squash-related. To say we were furious is an understatement. We decided we had to make our “pretty” fence ugly again by making it higher.
This is the fence that the deer could easily jump over.
And here’s the deer walking around the back of our driveway “pretending” she doesn’t see all the goodness growing inside the garden gate!
But first I went back to the farm down the road in hopes that there would be some vegetables to purchase. I was in luck when not only were there vegetables left but now everything was half price! So for $24, I managed to get new tomato plants, more broccoli, lettuce and Swiss chard. And I bought some Hungarian wax peppers to plant, too. And since I was not particularly confident we would pull off recreating the wheel (I mean fence), I bought some tomato plants that just needed to be replanted into bigger containers that I could grow on the deck.
When I got home, we hauled out the old fence we had unceremoniously rolled up, tying the rolls closed with duct tape. We thought maybe we could just unroll all the old stuff and attach it to the new fence. Our goal was to achieve some height. I mean, really, how high can a deer jump? According to at least four videos we watched, apparently six feet is the magic number. So, we had to make sure the “new” but soon-to-be-ugly fence was higher than that.
And then there was soap. In the past, we, too, had wasted money on bottles of deer “repellent,” dried blood in various forms, and other useless products we were sucked into buying.
Anything that has a powerful “scent” we were told would also aid in keeping them away. So after the greenhouse, I stopped at the supermarket and bought three bars of Irish Spring. Lynn cut them into thirds, drilled a hole in them, and hung them around the “key” areas of the garden.
At this point, for the first time ever, I really started to rethink the garden. After all, we support many local farmers in the area and there are numerous Amish farms within a five minute drive of our house. Couldn’t we just buy ALL our produce from them this summer? There is, however, a certain satisfaction to growing your own food and making something that’s edible and healthy. Plus, what would I write about and photograph if I didn’t have that one perfect tomato or zucchini or celery to brag about?
This, unfortunately, is how we had to add height. Attaching the old fence to the top of the new fence with some wire.
And then we realized we didn’t have enough “old” fence to finish the project. Why that is I don’t know since the dimensions of the new fence and the old fence were basically the same. Which is why at 5 p.m. we got in the car and made the trip to the big box store to look at our fencing options. This item, like lumber, had gone up in price as well. $72 later we headed home with a roll of fencing and finished the job nearly eight hours after we had started it.
My arms were scratched (and bleeding) from constantly hitting a thorny raspberry bush that I kept bumping into as we tried to unwrap the new fence. Why the deer don’t eat these berries is a mystery but they don’t. One of my legs was also dripping with blood since the sharp end of the fence roll kept hitting my leg as Lynn kept trying to measure (and cut) each section we needed. Besides all this, we were also hot, tired and sunburned.
When we were done that evening and I went back into the kitchen, I remembered when he finally came home from surgery that day. He hadn’t eaten in over 24 hours and was hungry! I had planned ahead. There was bread from the bakery, chicken cutlets, salad, even a Guinness-spiked pot roast! He wanted something “simple” so I quickly made him our “jet lag” dish – a ham and cheese omelet with fresh chives from our garden.
“Drink some water,” I implored him as I, myself, sipped a glass of wine, sorry he couldn’t join me.
I started to clean up the kitchen and begged him to sit down but he just wanted to stand and watch me. Apparently, when he was coming out of the anesthesia, he thought the attending female nurse was me and started to stroke her hair. I laughed and was humbled by that innocent, affectionate gesture. And then right before we turned the kitchen lights off, he looked at the stove and said, “you put the burners on the wrong way.”
And that’s why as long as I’m living in the Red House, I will never give up my garden. Even if everything I’m eating tastes a little bit like Irish Spring.