Something has devoured my flowers.
I suspect it was the deer. A family of deer (buck, doe, and two fawns) have been coming to the parkish place behind my apartment for a couple of weeks. They are beautiful, and wild, and tame, and charming. They have no fear of humans, or their dogs, though if you approach they will grudgingly move on.
They come most often in the late afternoon, and I can see them as I sit writing. Sometimes I find them hiding from the sun under a large pine tree in the front, as I walk out to get the mail. The fawns are a few weeks old at most, and I can see their legs trembling still as they stand and munch the grass, or the leaves that have fallen during the frequent summer storms.
I had planted the flower seeds sometime in June, in the 10x4 patch of ground that serves for a garden in front of my porch. I don’t recall what kind of flowers they were. I had ordered a packet of seeds for flowers that would attract butterflies. They had grown to about 8 to 10 inches tall, the largest with broad oval-shaped leaves, handsome and not at all delicate. They had not flowered, so I don’t know what kind or color they would have been. And now I will never know. '
When I woke this morning and looked out, all of the leaves had been eaten, leaving bare slender stalks standing like small green telephone poles, or an invasion of tiny slender aliens. Perhaps they will grow leaves again. But I doubt it.
I was angry at first – these are the first of anything that I had planted myself (though honestly I did little more than disturb the ground and sprinkle). And water faithfully, as instructed. But now, I suppose I can’t blame the deer; they have offered fair trade, beauty for beauty.
Perhaps beauty is the price of beauty, always a trade, beauty like energy being never created nor destroyed. The law of conservation of beauty. Perhaps that applies to many areas of life, as well, all things in balance on the seesaw of eternity.
Perhaps. But until the deer start hovering delicately over my garden like butterlies, I will regret the loss of my flowers.
Photo by Kristina Paukshtite: https://www.pexels.com/photo/blue-white-and-red-poppy-flower-field-712876/
