January 6, 2024
The day started at 4 AM. I had an espresso with milk and spent a few hours working on an article for my blog and posting on a social media platform called Medium. The article centers on a dream I had last week, and examines how conscious we are about the quality of our daily life experiences.
At 9 AM, I left for a small coffee shop in Wilson named Cup of Joy Coffee. The Wilson Camera Club was there for a meet and greet, and I wanted to get more information about what they do. The people were friendly, and I ended up joining, submitting an application, and paying the twenty-five dollar annual fee plus one dollar to cover the card transaction. Some highlights included monthly meetings, presentations from other photographers, and an annual trip to photograph bears in North Carolina.
After signing up, I called my wife to see what she was doing and, by chance, she had just arrived in Wilson to get a vaccination. I met here at the CVS to make sure she didn’t have any adverse reactions, and then I invited her to lunch at La Rancherita. We were the first ones there when the restaurant opened at 11 AM, and Kate, a server that has waited on our table many times, whisked us away into her section. As usual, the food and service were phenomenal. I ordered my regular, the Lime Carne Asada. The marinade they use for their beef skirt steak is unbelievably on point.
Once I finished lunch, I drove home, played with the dogs, then locked myself in my office to read an essay by E. B. White, titled, “Goodbye to 48th Street. After doing a deep dive into the older writing styles of Emerson and Thoreau, E. B. White’s modern prose was a breeze to get through, and I appreciated his concise writing and smart sense of humor. After, I spent a couple of hours banging on the keyboard.
It rained hard all morning, but around 3 PM, the skies cleared and we drove to Lake Wilson for a four-mile walk. It was nice being there in the evening, seeing the sunset instead of the sunrise. The lights and colors were all reversed from our normal morning routine. It’s hard to convey the specialness of a place like Lake Wilson when I’m there so often. In reality, every trip is a deep physical and psychological immersion into nature.
When I arrived home from the lake, I went into the woods to collect an SD card from a trail camera found on the north end of the pine grove where the grove meets the woodland forest. I spent a little time in the woods before coming back home and popping the SD card into a reader connected to my iPad.
Deer season ended here in North Carolina on the first of January. Most deer hunters head out into the woods every season hoping to harvest a nice buck, although later in the season, many will take the does as well. On my property, a young bucks frequent the area, all with small two-point or four-point racks. Last year, I caught an eight-pointer on one of my trail cameras on the edge of the property. One barely video glimpsed the male deer, and another confirmed the buck’s presence. After those two spottings, I never saw him again.
This season, I only saw a few small bucks early in the season. I thought that the larger bucks either had different habitats or someone had already hunted them. So, you can imagine my surprise when I opened the SD card on my iPad, and on January 1st, the day deer season ended, there were four different bucks on my property. One video showed a large eight-pointer, while another showed two eight-pointers hanging out and feeding together. It was pretty comical. It was like they knew they were finally safe to come out. I look forward to seeing these’s bucks’ offspring later this year.