A little over two years ago, in January, I wrote a covid-adjacent poem about a gimpy deer we’d see from time to time in our backyard. A doe that got along on three legs, her rear left leg dragging, probably from a run-in with a car. I was amazed that she was surviving amidst our maze of streets and our (occasionally) coyote-haunted woods. Here are the last two verses of the poem:

We stood at the window in the ruins of a year
that has left our hearts in tangles and our minds afog.
Out there behind the house all these months
she had limped along, prowling nights
loud with howls and honks, bedding down
in some thicket to drowse the long days. 

And here she stood in the yard after all this time,
so fragile, so resilient, having somehow survived
it all. And here we stood, a little ashamed
at our brittleness, our comforts,
our complaints, in our parallel world
we pretend is the only one.

Well, a couple days ago, taking my end-of-day jog along the streets of the Crestwood neighborhood, I looked up and there she was again! We surprised each other, and both of us stopped in our tracks. She was in a grassy ditch between houses, healthy-looking, though her leg had contracted up close to her body in an S-shape, out of the way when she walked. I took out my phone for this picture.

She allowed that, then after a time began to ease away into the yard, seeming unafraid, just tired of looking at me. And that’s when I saw the most heartening thing. Further back in the yard stood a half dozen other deer, including a couple yearling fawns. She’d found her herd! Adopted by a tribe not put off by her disability. Yes, I’m sentimental. Yes, I hear all the complaints about troublesome deer in the suburbs. But honestly, in this week of the solar eclipse, for me, this was the encounter that dazzled.