June 30, 2024

The Whittler

The morning started at six o’clock. After washing up, I saw my wife was in the front yard with our dog Kilo, encouraging her to move around. Her tweaked back was getting better, but we could see Kilo was not at one hundred percent. Still, she seemed to have improved enough to stop her prescribed muscle relaxers.

My wife and I had coffee together and hung out with the dogs. After we put in a new coffee order with Nespresso, my wife got busy studying while I did the dishes and put some laundry to wash. When I was done, I locked myself in my office and wrote for a couple of hours.

After my wife’s study session was over, she changed clothes and began mowing the lawn. Yesterday, I had finished most of the pasture and about half of the cleared land that needed mowing. While she mowed, I left the house to fill up a five gallon gas can and my wife’s SUV. That would give us plenty of gasoline for mowing and get her car ready for the upcoming work week.

When I returned home, I gathered my camera equipment and headed out into the woods to sit in the blind for about ninety minutes, when my wife and I planned to rendezvous at the house for lunch. As I made my way down a hill toward the blind, I heard a deer bark and then run through the forest, stopping somewhere just out of sight.

After zipping myself inside the blind, I set up my equipment. I knew my lenses would need about fifteen minutes to warm so they wouldn’t fog, so I made some notes on my phone before shooting photographs. Today, I brought a cold drink to help keep me hydrated and a can of insect repellent I planned to leave stored inside the blind.

Within a few minutes, a small chickadee visited the feeding area. My lenses were still fogging, so I didn’t take any pictures. The forest, darkened by the thick clouds, made shooting with a telephoto lens all but impossible. As I waited, I sipped on some water, wondering how hot it would get. After sitting for ten minutes, sweat was already dripping down my forehead. Five minutes later, a tufted titmouse showed up, but I still didn’t have the light I needed to freeze the tiny bird in action.

Yesterday, when I put the corn out, I placed some further away from the feeding area where the deer approached a few days ago. My idea was to draw them in to the feeding area. Today, however, I saw this was a mistake because several squirrels and birds fed on the more distant food, but never came to the feeding area. This kept them out of optimal shooting range. Lesson learned: Wildlife always took the path of least resistance. Next time, I would only place feed where I wanted the animals to be.

On the way back to the house, I spooked two deer bedded near the grove. They ran north, disappearing into the woodland. The hot temperatures kept the animals bedded in the shade. I figured they didn’t want to come out to eat, and they didn’t want me interfering with their rest.

When I stepped inside the house, my wife had finished mowing and taken a shower. She was in the kitchen listening to one of her murder podcasts while whipping up a late breakfast of bacon, eggs, and homemade biscuits with gravy. I changed clothes and then sat down at the table, ready to eat after smelling the bacon that permeated the house. We sat down and had a lovely meal together.

Kilo was feeling better, getting up on her own and walking around the house. After my wife left the dining room, Bodhi spotted a crumb on the table. He kept eyeballing it and I pretended I was looking the other way while my wife giggled from the kitchen. We could see the gears turning in his head, weighing the risk versus reward. In the end, he got shy and walked off wagging his tail. He was a good boy today, a rare occurrence.

I cleaned up the kitchen and then went to shower. When I came out, my wife told me she had spotted the doe with her twin fawns we saw yesterday. The doe and one fawn crossed through our fence into the pasture, but the other fawn couldn’t figure out how to get through the fence.

In a fit of energy, the second fawn bolted around the fence, ran through the yard, and sprinted into the hidden trailhead. My wife was worried the fawn was alone, away from its mother, but I had learned that nature had a plan for everything. I was sure they were fine, although I was sorry I missed the show.

My wife, who was studying on the couch, went quiet. When I peeked out of my office, I saw she had fallen asleep. I left the door cracked open and sat down to write as she rested. As I wrote, the sky turned dark and thunder rolled across the land. Nature, in all her goodness, provided a special treat, a much appreciated summer shower. At first, the rain was soft, barely a sprinkle. But after an hour, it picked up and fell steadily. 

These moments always made me feel happy I was no longer in Texas. The summers there were brutal, and once the heat arrived, day or night, it did not go away. While the humidity in North Carolina could feel unbearable, every few weeks we got a day or two of reprieve. When my wife awoke, she smiled when I lifted the blinds for her to see the water falling outside.

My wife washed up and resumed her studies. Because she had put in so much school time, I thought she probably didn’t feel like cooking, so I invited her out to dinner. She accepted, later asking if we could stop by Mattress Firm to look at a bed for the spare bedroom.

The experience at the Mattress Firm was hilarious. Lee, our salesperson, was an older gentleman right out of a movie. We appreciated his extensive knowledge of the products and his perfectly rehearsed responses. The man covered everything we wanted to know, and then some.

When talking about the wiggle room he had to cut us a deal, he pulled out his folded pocket knife, assuring he could do a little whittling on the price, while making the disclaimer that his whittling knife was no chainsaw. I also liked it when he kept smacking his PC while telling it to think like a Mac. He also had a pen collection which won points with me. And last but not least, he gave us an extra hundred dollars off the sale, on the condition that I would use the savings to take my wife out on what he called a cheap date. This guy was good.

We purchased a nice mattress and were happy to learn the store would deliver it to our home on Tuesday. We headed off to La Rancherita, where we celebrated our purchase and the end of the weekend. The food was good, although the decision to sit outside proved questionable. Inspired by Lee’s quirky sayings, I told my wife that I had burned more calories shooing flies than the calories I had eaten off my plate.

When we arrived home, my wife and I went outside to relax, me with a cold IPA and my wife with her school computer to study.