This morning was no different from most. I woke at 6:30, rose and dressed; sleeping was over and there was much to do to prepare for Father’s Day forty-eight hours away.
Morning tasks are always the same. I started the coffee, mixed my morning yogurt with something (today it was muesli), and hung the suet feeders brought in each night lest the raccoons maraud. With everything ready, I squinted out the sidelights of the front door to see if the paper had arrived. Couldn’t see one up at the top of the driveway but the juniper has gotten bushy, enough sometimes to hide it.
I stepped onto the front steps. It rained last night and this morning the air was cool and damp. The mockingbird performed repertoire and the breeze was pulling blue into the northeastern sky.
The walkway parallels the house and connects with the driveway by the garage. I strolled to the end and looked up. No paper. As I turned back toward the door something caught my eye.
Something chestnut red with snowy spots.
I looked down and there, about a foot and a half away, was a fawn submerged in the lacey foliage of some white astilbe. I stopped, barely daring to breathe; options raced through my mind: don’t move, pat the fawn, get my Dear One, find the camera. “Find the camera” won.
I envisioned the camera sitting on the scanner in my office down in the basement. I walked as quickly and quietly as I could to the front door, ran out of my sandals, charged down the stairs, grabbed the camera and turned it on, removed the lens cap and checked to see that the camera was set to automatic as I ran back up the stairs and down the hall to the front door, all the while praying, “be there, be there, be there…”
There's a fawn in the astilbe!
I opened the door carefully and moved back toward the flowers. Oh. My. Gawd. The fawn had not moved. As I approached I took a picture, including most of that end of the garden. Then I zoomed in a bit. I stopped directly in front of the sweet thing and located his head, round brown Bambi eyes looking at me with deep suspicion.
the fawn closer up
I leaned in and took another photo, zoomed again and took one more.
Asti in his nest
At this point Asti, as I have named him, decided that enough was quite enough. He exploded vertically from his nest in the feathery green and bounded in great Disneyesque leaps across the walkway, past the house and toward the woods. By the time I reached the corner, not quite forty feet away, Asti was nowhere to be seen.
Yes, then I went and woke my Dear One.
“Honey,” I said as I shook his shoulder gently. “There’s a fawn in the astilbe!”