Deer, Dear Me

Another snowstorm moved into our yard at the start of "The Huggable Durretts' 29th Anniversary Celebration Weekend Sans Pie, Where's the Lemon Pie, Lady?"

I looked out the kitchen window to see if my wife had arrived at the cozy abode / love nest / overstuffed closet.

Run! Run like the wind! Donna's home!

Meanwhile...

Morty's panicked with the prospect of being snowed in for days.

He gave me the evil eye, which means only one thing. I would be perpetual lunch unless I fetched Whiskas with gravy.

Can I help it I am juicy?

I hiked the six miles to the store and six back.

I had no choice. Morty's fangs morphed into sporks.

'Meet the Neighborhood -or- Getting to Snow You - Stuff I'm Too Lazy to Go Type Up #4'

Residing in the sunny south, specifically Georgia, means one thing for certain. Folks go ape over snow accumulations of any insignificance and one-half inch or more is stunning.

Well, we go ape after going bats, first raiding the store shelves of milk and toilet paper, as if Armageddon were trick-or-treating on our doorsteps.

So, from home and into the woods, with rare delight and a couple of rolls of Charmin (Ooo, quilted!), let's slide with the camera down the sleet, through the courtesy of Mike's two feet.


''Stuff I'm Too Lazy to Go Type Up #4: Meet the Neighborhood -or- Getting to Snow You'' via YouTube
Snow be purty.

Big Weekend

Big weekend, battling nature.

A water pipe froze at the house during a savage cold spell.

Enter trusty hero: my Snoopy hair dryer.

Snoopy has saved us from broken pipes on several occasions by simply blowing hot air out of his nose onto the affected area. Our recent struggle, shown in these dramatic reenactments, took 40 minutes in the dark of night to turn pipe ice into flowing water. For comparison, similar frozen plumbing dilemmas have thawed in 20 minutes or less.

One contributing factor to the problem, we suspect, is a lack of wall insulation. I haven't looked inside because I am wary of the the teeming ecosystem of homesteading spiders, who are huge and mean, sporting brass knuckles and tattoos of the shrews from "The View."

The spiders also high eight me and point and giggle.

And don't get me started on their dorm mixers.

I drip the pipes with diligence throughout the winter to avoid this very situation. Nevertheless, surprises do occur, thrusting me outside into the frigid weather for long stints assisting Snoopy in his toasty magic, while worrying about area burly bears queuing up behind me for a drink and chaser from the faucet and my aorta. (Shake well before enjoying.)

That's a scenario causing me valid concern, when coupled with the nearby Lucy Van Pelt Weedwacker, telegraphing, "YOU BLOCKHEAD!" in my direction.

Big Weekend

Big weekend, winterizing.

Eleven degrees!

When it's this cold, I insist on dripping all of the pipes. My wife insists on puppy padding my mattress.

Who could sleep? I was up all night Deep Heat Rubbing the brass monkey.

I hate this weather, but thanks for me being named Belle of the Ball.

Video Webisode: 'Stuff I'm Too Lazy to Go Type Up #3: In Color'

Mike Durrett, celebrated filmmaker ("We're not like him! We're not like him!..."), goes for an impromptu walk in the fall rain. When nature calls, one must video cam.



"Stuff I'm Too Lazy to Go Type Up #3: In Color" via YouTube  
More: Mike's CONFIDENTIAL Video Webisodes

Meet the Neighbors

We're tolerant people. Our gate, which we're too slack to get out of the car to close, is always open to the community, but that doesn't mean we want hotties undulating in and doing it on our kitchen porch.

We're gonna be humiliated on Google Earth, I just know. Where are my dark glasses? ... When I hold my head down, I show chins. ... Please become me, parasols....


With this ring, I hope they thine wed.

Hey, giddy-ups! See that wall? Just beyond is where I keep my pleasing array of spreads and in-progress bottled relishes, endorsed by a cartoon stork toking a pickle. Don't do it near the eats, okay?

Sheesh, they didn't even comment in our guest book.

Meanwhile...

Morty was fascinated with the record once-in-a-century flood dousing us in Georgia. He had that TV on around the clock, when all the cat needed to do was look out the window, go outside even. No, he wouldn't do that. Kids gotta have their electronic gadgets to filter life. Why bother to actually experience?

Morty did offer to dash down to our creek bank to check on the water currents, but only if I'd buy him a catnip snorkel.

I didn't fall for that one, believe, you, me. We've got catnip flippers strewn all through this house, but just try to find a fourth.

Oh, sure, I could locate two left rears, except they don't fit Morty up front in "Shotgun."

Besides, flippers are a moot mew anyway. He'll only wear them to waddle through catnip slobber.

Big Weekend

MARIETTA, Ga.

Kayakity-Yak

My friend Bill Jackson, who doubles for the beloved actor William Colquitt in movies, plays, Las Vegas ooo-la-la! revues, evil dictatorships, and Halloween door-to-doors, sent along this photo.

Kathy and I went to the Broad River [Sunday] - floated down the river for about 2.5 hours.

They take you up the river about 5 miles in an old shool bus - saw this and (for some reason) thought of you....

I've made quite a following with my body fluids.

Epilogue: The Lost Fawn and the Broken Bird

Continued From: "I Don't Care to Laugh Today"


On Sunday, Donna and I partially exhumed the remains of the fawn that has touched us so. I sliced into the sealed bag containing the baby, allowing nature to continue its process unobstructed.

Minutes after burying the deer again, we were back inside our kitchen when Donna was surprised, looking through the window.

"There's a coyote coming down the driveway," she said. "His nose is in the air. He smells something."

I was amazed. Ten years we've lived in this forest and never seen a coyote nor received reports of any in the vicinity. Sure, we've heard them howling from distant locations, but why choose this hour to appear mere footsteps away from the doomed deer?

The animal vanished and I went to the computer. Research shows sobering statistics, including one study touting 70% of fawn fatalities are at the jaws of coyotes. Their favorite snack food treats, I'm guessing.

Our hunch, due to the seemingly surreal materialization in the yard, is a coyote destroyed the fawn. The neighbors suspect a dog and our veterinarian confirmed a heavy canine fancy for the newborns.

While I had the good doctor on the telephone, I inquired of the injured bird found alongside our cabin Saturday evening, probably as a result of flying into the very same window. We had protected and nursed the erratic cardinal to an improved condition, but, after two days, we transferred her care to the local animal hospital, for the little one was fading.

It was determined the patient had suffered a neurological trauma from which recovery was not possible. Mercy brought euthanasia.

I've been melancholy since the weekend. I both love and abhor nature. Why does it have to be so cruel? Obviously, it works, but so did the Edsel.

Writing to a niece earlier, I mentioned, "I was heartened this morning, first thing, to see a doe and smallish fawn strolling in the sunshine at the end of our driveway."

I released my grip of the cord to the blinds in the kitchen window and went into the day.

I Don't Care to Laugh Today

Saturday Night

Donna informed me we would be washing the car. Okay, after almost 17 years of driving my trusty, beloved, paid-for Saturn, I can treat it to a buff, bubbles, and suck hose. We took off down the gravelly lane from our house in the forest to the paved street aimed towards town.

As we neared our mailbox, I pointed at a small embankment where two nights ago something tumbled out of the brush and rolled to the ground at the side of my car. I had looked to the right and over my shoulder to see a tiny fawn race for cover back into the grassy yard of the closest cabin.

Donna saw a newborn fawn in a patch of our woods above the pond, three or four Sunday mornings ago. He was with Mama, bouncing and playing in the early sunshine.

I began an intermittent vigil by the kitchen window, where the wildlife commonly appear outside our home. It took a week or two, but at the end of the long driveway, I saw the baby deer scurry left to right and out of sight. He was too distant for a snapshot and never reappeared that day or any other.

I have no proof, but I'm confident the fawn I saw Thursday evening was the very same cuddly critter, full of life and raring to go. As I approached the house, located, perhaps, one-tenth of a mile away in a straight line, I wished for the little guy or gal's safety. I wanted him to come onto our secluded acreage and keep clear of the two-lane blacktop.

So, late this afternoon, two streets from home, while cruising to the carwash, there appeared a common, ugly sight up the pavement ahead -- a lump, motionless on the yellow center lines. I slowed to discover fresh roadkill. A good-sized raccoon, a gorgeous animal, snuffed in sudden, unanticipated mayhem. His severed tail had been flung into the opposite lane, four yards south.

Donna and I shuddered in disgust. Nature is beyond brutal.

We ate sandwiches at our favorite deli, a choice hour for us to be vegetarians, then headed over to the carwash, paid the six bucks, soaped up the automobile, and I gallantly removed all of my rippled muscles from the driver's seat to apply the polish cloth to the exterior roof and bumpers and the in-betweens. Nature cooed.

My car, reborn showroom shiny, purred to the supermarket. We bought the weekly groceries and motored homeward.

The raccoon's carcass continued in the road, heat: 93 degrees. By now, most of his tail was elsewhere, probably inside birds. A bit of fur fluttered on the asphalt.

I love the country living, but the unceasing tumultuous death phenomenon which surrounds us is appalling.

Eventually, I reached the mailbox at the intersection to our street. I fetched the junk messages and put the car into gear. Twenty seconds later, I pinpointed the exact thatch where I had seen the fawn two nights before. I squinted into the trees, looking for the bitty brown buddy with the pretty white spots.

I navigated the meandering curves and, as the Saturn rolled over the exact place in the road where we first glimpsed and rescued our distraught kitten, Morty, late one rainy night eight joyful years ago, we saw the day's second motionless lump.

I couldn't quite identify what I was viewing, but Donna did.

"Oh, Mike! It's the deer!"

I surely blanched. I refocused and recognized the little face, beneath a swarming mess of particularly nasty dark blue flies and assorted moth-like predators.

I stopped the car. I was shocked, disoriented, and attacked by sudden grief. How horribly sad, this beautiful, once immaculate creature, most certainly a month or less old, is now gone.

Something else was amiss.

Donna scuffed over for a clearer assessment of the body. There was the sweet-featured head and only two legs. The deer's hind half was nowhere to be seen.

I left Donna to protect the fawn from vultures and other vehicles until I could return with a shovel. I proceeded forward, decelerating a moment to avoid a bulldog.

After retrieving what I needed from the tool shed, I raced back to my wife and parked. I grabbed the shovel, then handed Donna a black, heavy duty trash bag and asked her to hold it open for me. I swallowed and grasped the chore, without looking any closer than the minimal necessity. As I did, a crowd of neighbors appeared.

Weaving together everyone's observations of the previous hours, we determined that the bulldog had discovered and carried the front half of the fawn a block or two from the place of its grisly demise alongside the paved road.

One man assured us, having seen the deceased earlier at the previous location, that it was heaped in the grass -- and incomplete.

"It was no roadkill," he said. "That deer was cut in half."

Then, he said it again.

Not then, not now do I elect to consider the implications of his statement.

I held my breath, managed some resolve, and shoveled the poor animal into the bag. After tying off the deer and the stench inside the dark plastic confines, we made our cordial excuses to leave the group behind to commence a burial on our property.

But first, Donna and I returned to the main thoroughfare. From the car, we walked up the steep incline and circled down the opposite side, hoping and not hoping to find more remains. The areas were woodsy and overgrown. We saw nothing unusual and returned to the sedan.

"Let's drive further," I said. We reached the top of the big hill. Donna signaled for me to pull over.

"I can smell it," she shared, exiting, while I idled. She investigated across a 100-foot stretch of land. Peering deep into the overgrowth and the adjacent culvert, she let me know, pointing, "the scent is especially strong right here."

Alas, with dusk approaching, we abandoned our search to go dig a hole.

Back at the house, I raised the hood of the trunk to get the shovel. Donna contemplated the final resting place. We were talking when suddenly we both saw, not 20 feet away, a doe stroll through the clearing, slowly, gazing about and analyzing us. We stood still, as she walked haltingly into the woods.

This bizarre day had just gotten weirder. The deer in these parts are afraid of humans and bolt at first sight of friends and foes.

It had occurred to us that the fawn may have been separated from its mother, which might explain the baby's dangerous proximity to the busy road. Was this lone deer the mother? I have no irrefutable proof, but the timing of her appearance and odd, trusting manner was certainly eerie. Could she have been searching for a lost child?

Donna selected a shady plot over by the picnic table, around the general stomping paths of the local deer population. We took turns on the shovel. After half an hour or so, we agreed we were done digging. I went to the car, while Donna retrieved an armload of spare bricks we stored by a retaining wall.

I liked nothing about this morbid task. I don't recall ever personally burying anything before this evening. I hefted the few pounds of deer from the trunk and returned to the grave. I hoped the young one was heads up as I place the corpse into the ground. I was unable to force myself to feel the contents of the bag to be sure.

With one hand somewhere on my hip and the other grasping the shovel pole to keep me standing erect, I said a silent prayer for this unfortunate innocent, whose full, frisky torso could not have been much larger than a loaf of bread. I bawled in a gush for the nameless and precious creature I had met in death mere minutes before.

Donna returned to my side and kissed me on the cheek. We didn't speak. I pulled some loose dirt towards me and it plopped onto the body bag. The sound of earth smacking plastic is about as cold as it gets.

When the distasteful deed was completed, I stepped onto the grave and packed and leveled the soil under my sneakers. We set four bricks in place, acquired more and removed several large creek rocks from a flowerbed to protect the fawn's final resting place.

Again to the car where I filled both hands with groceries, bags of life. Donna followed. When I reached the foot of the steps to the porch, something caught my eye. Perched on wet leaves at my feet was a quiet brown bird the size of a fist, moving her head about in an erratic pattern.

"Donna, come here. You aren't going to believe this."

The cardinal didn't ruffle feathers and fly. She never tried or couldn't. Instead, she appeared to be clearing her mind, tilting the skull to the right and straight up, repeatedly. We figure she flew into the closed kitchen window with intense force, possibly, causing brain damage.

I phoned a friend who nurtures pet birds and requested advice. The trauma-filled patient with the askew tail feathers is presently resting in a paper carton away from ground predators. We included food, water, and our best thoughts.

"She'll either get better and fly away or die," intoned the voice over the phone.

Not many weeks ago, Donna nicknamed me "Father Goose," due to the manner in which I've doted on our various cats through illness and health.

I feel my domain expanding. I dream I take care of all the animals, preventing violence and cruelty upon them. And then I wake up.

Tomorrow, to a possible birdy funeral and, with melancholy, I'm positive, to the exhumation of the small deer. To correct my oversight, I'll cut open that plastic bag and rebury the fawn into the earth proper.

Dust to dust.

Just.

Meet the Neighbors

Early, over the weekend, Donna taunted me with the details of a baby she saw bounding playfully in the forest adjacent to our home. I was envious and grabbed her camera. That would teach her.


Several days elapsed, but around four o'clock in the afternoon, I opened the refrigerator for a snack and out of the corner of my eye, I espied a polka-dotted blur ambling my way, down the drive. The very same tot, our newest neighbor, came a-callin'!


Huh? What's this? Hey, it was twins!


Seems these young'uns had been giving us the classic twins' fake-out, taking turns pretending to be a total of one.


Yeah, play tricks on the old people in the woods, punks.

And their mother allows them, saying nothing.

Meet the Neighbors

These ladies reside a couple of places up and across our creek.

Sisters? I don't know. They don't talk much. Others, I have heard, whisper of "professional women."

I was pleased, on a recent afternoon, with the pair's momentary pose for my camera while they were trimming the lawn.

When I'm working late at my desk, I will often hear one cry out at four in the morning.

I worry.

Distress? Or marital bliss?

I keep to myself.

I Got Nuthin'

_{"Extreme Sheepherding" via YouTube}

I Got Nuthin'

_{"Dolphin Stampede" via YouTube}

And One Dalmatian

I love to romp in the snow, but I'm thinking this Colorado gal may have me beat.


_{Can't see the video? Try reloading this page or visit YouTube.
Thanks to Stan Malone.}

Living Color

After inhabiting a monochrome world for an afternoon, thanks to a snow shower, it's amazing to note, only a blink ago, we were surrounded by sumptuous color viewing.

These pictures were snapped near evening on Nov. 2 at Amicalola Falls State Park, just down the forest from Dahlonega, GA.





The colorful foliage was savory, a nice topper for Fresh Haircut Day* festivities. Rinse. Repeat.

_{*BYOB
(Bring Your Own Bangs)}

Duck Season! Goose Season! Fish Season! Bear Season!

Alert eyes may have noticed the large bird lounging next to our creek in the previous photograph. That's our goose, commonly known around here as, of course, The Duck. I've written about him before, as you may recall.

The Duck weathered the snowstorm calm and cool. He's a decoy, which floated on the current from up north about five years ago and washed onto our shore. He's not much maintenance, although once a year I have to trudge down to the water bank to right him. I suspect he gets knocked over by a bear gone fishin'.

Hmmm. Anyone seen our greeter?

Up the Creek Without a Snowman

Continued From: "100 Things About Me #162: White Out"


We didn't receive ample accumulation to make a snowman, but I did manage enough to roll a snowtot and several snowembryos, so that was nice.