Point of View: A Sacred Place
“Cuidado,” I said to the guys who were digging holes for deer-eschewing perennials in our garden plot, a large arced one at the edge of our front yard that I’d abandoned years ago when the deer began to come, “Nuestro gato es enterrado alla.”
We’d buried our cat, Little Man, by the tree trunk, on which he used to lie, seemingly asleep on his side, slit-eyed, ever watchful. The trunk’s no longer there, so I wasn’t sure. Anyway, the diggers missed him, I’m happy to say.
Soon after, Alex Silva, who presided, said, “They’re asking me where you buried your money.”
“No tengo dinero,” I said, but afterward — it’s always afterward — I thought I should have run out and said, “Here! I think it’s here. . . . No, no . . . over here!”
At any rate, we were very thankful for their work, and now we have again a garden, of coreopsis, vitex, lavender, butterfly bushes, hardy geraniums, and lichnis that Alex says is about as deer-proof as you can get.
The very next morning, not long after dawn, I saw a mother and two fawns at its edge. But, lo, they went on their way. The next day, there were the two fawns, one of which began to nibble at the coreopsis as I tapped menacingly at the window. They seemed surprised — after all, we don’t begrudge them the birdseed in the backyard — and backed away.
Mary put the dangling ruby-colored nectar jar that is supposed to attract hummingbirds in the new garden, and a pensive statuette that looks like a sepia photograph of my mother on her grandmother’s farm in Ebensburg, Pa., when she was about 5 or 6.
We look upon it as a sacred place. It was Little Man, after all, who first taught us how to die — leaping forth as he breathed his last.
“Only we see death; the free animal has its demise,” says Rilke in the eighth of his Duino Elegies, “perpetually behind it and always before it / God, and when it moves, it moves into eternity, the way brooks and running springs move. . . .”
“WE, though: never, not for one day, do we / have that pure space ahead of us into which flowers endlessly open. . . .”
Now, if only the deer and we, who tend to kill the things we love (some do it by overwatering), will let them.
