By Robert Lucke
This column is about three things. First it is all about chokecherries. Then it turns to how your humble correspondent proved his doctor wrong (almost) and got gored by a 100-year-old deer. First the chokecherries.
Never have we seen such an abundant crop of chokecherries. Why, they are all over the place. Get out to Beaver Creek Park or most any valley floor and you can pick scads in short order.
Now mind you, some don't like chokecherries because they are tart and have pits. But we say to you, that until you have made some homemade chokecherry syrup and had some on your pancakes or waffles when it is 40 below and the blizzard is striking outdoors, you have not lived at all! Get out and start picking!
We freely admit that we have never gotten along with what we call the "Almas" deer in our house. We bought them from a fellow who was turning the Young-Almas house into a funeral home and he did not think that heads looking down on corpses was such a good thing. Now these heads had not been off the walls since that house was built and when we moved them, well, it is enough to say that they have never forgiven us one little bit! Their expressions year after year have remained dour to say the least.
Last spring we added a small room onto our cabin and since moving into the place, have had nothing but trouble with wasps who all summer long, as nearly as we can figure, are attracted to the multitude of different stains in that part of the house.
So, gentle readers, last Saturday night we were getting ready for bed when another wasp appeared, high above us in that new room in a second floor dormer window. We knew we couldn't just leave him to fly around. Having done that one other time, we ended up getting bitten in bed. So we thought if we got a long ladder and a long broom, we could probably reach right over the "Alma" deer and smack that wasp to smithereens in short order. Well, up the ladder we climbed. We smacked the wasp all right, but in some way dislodged the deer who came tumbling down, down, down right for us.
We should tell you at this point that some of you know that we have prostate cancer and one doctor told us that probably that cancer would get us sooner or later.
Well, imagine what we were thinking right then, "No, that is not right. We are going out by being gored by an Almas' deer!"
The deer did gore us in the shoulder, a glancing blow, and then continued it's hurdle to a couch far below where our dog was watching. He actually saw it coming and moved under the couch so quickly we didn't even see him move at all. And when we did go to bed, we had to drag him out from under that couch. He wasn't coming out on his own for anything.
And the good news was that either we did get that wasp or else we frightened him out of the house. As we nursed our wounds, we noticed that once again we were living in a waspless house. Meanwhile, the "Almas" deer laid on the floor and after all these years, that dour expression had changed to a definite smirk!
