One of Martha's Facebook friends recently spotted this small herd of deer in the backyard of her Mom and Dad's house on Hickory Street, grazing peacefully and likely nibbling at the apples that have fallen from the big tree off the back deck.
It's the time of year for deer sightings. Martha told me this week that she saw two young spotted fawns, standing in the middle of the Walhalla Road outside the old Harbison Place. And a day or two later she saw a young deer at the top of our own road. Our small orchard did not produce a single apple this year or we would see them here in our own backyard.
Another perfect day for running this morning, lower 60s and overcast. When I arrived at the Park there were no runners, and after completing two miles there were still no runners, so I ended up completing another eight mile run entirely by myself, capping off another 20-mile week again. I should say I was almost entirely by myself; as I reached 7.92 miles according to my GPS watch, Fred was coming down Fifth Street, just finishing up his own run, so we ran 0.08 miles together, and then visited for awhile.
We threw caution to the winds Thursday night and decided to have our first take-out food since we returned in March, shrimp and vegetables from the Asia House. Everything I have read about Covid-19 stresses the dangers of eating in bars and restaurants, flying in airplanes, and visiting gyms, but take-out is thought to be safe. The Asia House still has a Health Department rating of 100, as far as I know, and everything seemed safe, with a big bottle of sanitizer on the table out front (they are closed to inside dining) and the bag daintily handed to me by a masked young woman. Emboldened by that experience, perhaps, Martha surprised me today by coming home with take-out from Highlands Burritos, a Tex-Mex place we enjoy and also rated 100 by the Health Department.
Martha urged me not to work all afternoon after an eight-mile run, but after lunch and my restorative cup of hot tea, I decided make a start on planing the hydrangeas and burning bushes we bought earlier in the week. It was still cool and overcast, and I found that the soil along the side of the road was mostly free of roots and rocks. So I ended up planting all of them, two hydrangeas near the driveway and the burning bushes stretching down to the woods below our property.
It is always satisfying completing this kind of work. Based on our experience with our other dozen burning bushes, they will grow to the same size in only three or four years, and the nice thing is that they reach a maximum height of six feet or so, just enough to screen our property from the road.
According to the internet, deer do not like hydrangeas very much at all, although they will nibble on them if they get hungry. But to my surprise I discovered that they like burning bushes. We have never noticed any damage before, although they clearly loved the hostas, eating them to the ground until there are only a few small ones left which they must have overlooked. Apparently they just nibble the leaves at the ends of some of the branches on burning bush. I suppose we could tolerate sharing them to that extent, as long as they don't decimate them. They are, after all, beautiful creatures, and I am grateful that we live in a part of the country where they roam freely.
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