THE DEER SERVANT

Had an old wooden chest of drawers that we bought in a secondhand shop 30 years ago in Kyoto when we first moved here from Spain, took it with us when we moved out here to PLM 15 years ago and finally wore it out, put it outside to chop slowly into kindling for the woodstove, till the two remaining drawers wound up sitting under a big old cedar like at any old frugal countryside household where you don't throw anything organic away until one way or another it becomes compost, so when I decided this year to try and start some seeds early (pre-frost) in a sort of hot box-- now what could I use for a hot box? Those drawers started jumping up and down saying Me! Me!

So I put the potted seeds in one of the drawers and set that drawer atop the other, tilted the structure southerly toward the sun and covered it with some thick plastic sheeting weighted down on top with some square wooden posts, the posts in turn weighted down with bricks to keep the wind from blowing the whole pro-tem bradyrig away, and it has worked quite well, as far as that goes, which so far isn't too far, because as regards my deeply considered design algorithm (subsequently tweaked for rain accumulation) I hadn't accounted for Delta, the deer factor...

I hadn't realized how searchingly curious deer are at this verdant-edge time of year, how eager they are to learn what this two-legged borrower of their territory is doing with the property these days... Of course they remember the delicious greens we once so kindly provided for them in convenient pots, so when they come browsing along in their nightly wanderings and behold this new contraption they say to themselves What kind of goody has my servant put out for me this time? And poking their several noses down into the plastic sheeting to probe and sniff, only to find nothing but soil in pots, they realize once again that these two-leggers really don't have a clue about how to prepare deer food; Look at all that spinach placed completely out of our reach behind those nets: what kind of consideration is that? To say nothing of this garnish of bricks.

I really should mend my ways.