As I walked home yesterday after sunrise, mesmerized by the hoarfrost and the slowly changing sky, I happen upon some deer. Well, I think they saw me coming; I didn’t see them at all. By the time I noticed they were in the bush, we were only a few feet apart.

The largest one stared me down. I realized I had gotten too close. Behind her were two young. She wasn’t appearing to be ready to back down. I instinctively raised my hands to show they were empty and in a motherly, sing-song voice, said “it’s okay, it’s okay.”

The deer stepped closer. ‘Oh crap.’ I thought.

And so I did the only thing that made sense. Actually, it didn’t make sense at all, in retrospect it was absurd. But it just came out, as though the deer understood me and I could convince her I wasn’t a threat.

“It’s okay, it’s okay, I’m a vegan.” Yup, that’s what I said aloud to the large deer squaring off with me. It was my best line of defence, although as I thought about it later, in January, perhaps another herbivore was far more threatening. You know, for the limited grass trapped under the snow.

[Enter voice one] “Great, you’re talking to deer now and explaining yourself.”

[Enter voice two] “Who’s to say she doesn’t understand. Don’t listen to her.”

(To be clear, hearing voices is a natural consequence of growing up in cozy spaces with four siblings. Someone always weighed in, whether you wanted them to or not. Thus my sisters’ opinions came effortlessly to my mind, even when they weren’t around.)

The deer came towards me. I took a step back, never letting go of our locked eyes.

‘No sudden moves’, I heard this or saw it on a TV show or something. I was so annoyed with myself; that I hadn’t read up on deer behaviour. ‘Bloody hell; who lives around so many deer and doesn’t bother to understand them? Mental note – must research deer behaviour.’

After what felt like a long time, she dropped her head and decided to go another way. I could see the tension leaving her body; the muscles on her legs relax. My legs felt like jelly. We were okay, the deer and I. Her young sensed that all was safe and ran ahead.

‘I’m vegan, seriously’, I thought as I was laughing my ass off in the forest. They kept going on their morning sunrise walk, while I was bent over in mad laughter. Well, why not, it made sense, if you think about it. In case that massive mother deer did understand, reassuring her that I was not a carnivore and therefore had no interest in eating her or her babies was a sound decision; it needed to be made abundantly clear.

I had been so scared I didn’t realize the music was still playing in my headphones. Slowly the sound came back, Whitney Houston’s ‘One Moment in Time’, circa 1980-something.

I started singing along, belting it out. The adrenaline that still surging through me; I kinda felt invincible.  

How telling was that moment, all of it, the entire morning. I am a predictable, simple creature. It takes very little to make me happy, even less to make me laugh. It was the best way to live, I was realizing, with a light heart, trusting the universe, and knowing in the end things would be alright, or in the very least, they would be as they were meant to be.

Less than an hour earlier I had ran to watch the sunrise because I lost track of time making crepes for the kids. Out of breath, I arrived on the bridge, looking out at the sky.

Clouds again. I took a picture; awful how the camera makes rather plain that which is so incredibly dynamic. Sure, it was a grey sky, but how many shades of grey (LOL, sorry, I wrote that and caught the reference to the book – to be clear – I am actually talking about different shades of grey (ha ha ha)).

I walked over to the stairs leading to the path that ran under the bridge from where I could step off into the waving prairie wheatgrass and carefully make my way down to the river. I used the same spot every day; my footprints were well beaten into the snow. Along the river heading east until I came to a slope where I took one step down and then allowed gravity to pull me, quickening to a little jog. I walked over to “my rock” and leaned against it.

The sun rise; some days I talk to it, some days I talk to my mother, some days I pray in Polish, with the words I was taught. Some days I sing along to whatever song is playing from my phone. And some days there is silence and I lay down over the rock, look far into the sky, and get lost in the clouds.

‘Mamo, mamo gdzie Ty jestes? [Mom, mom where are you?] I often think; we’ve been in this conversation for decades.  

“’Jestem tu, jestem z toba.’” [I am here, I am with you.] This is what she would have said to me. Tears rolled from the outer corners of my eyes. I exhaled deeply. I couldn’t allow myself to stay there too long, in that thought. It came easily for me to imagine being in another space and time, but I knew, I needed to remain in the present.

I sat up and looked at the horizon again. “’Remember, that just because you can’t see something, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there,’” she once told.

“Right,” I answered her aloud, “I remember.”

Far up river my eyes caught a herd of deer running onto the ice. They appeared spooked, leaping out of the tall grass on the opposite shore. Quickly they made their way across the wide river, closer to where I was still sitting on the rock.

‘Crap, coyotes’, I got nervous. ‘I’m basically a deer that can’t run.’

But then they stopped and turned around. ‘Hmm’ I thought, they were close enough to disappear into the trees, likely safe again, but they didn’t. ‘Probably not coyotes’; all eight deer stopped running and turned to look back at the spot from where they had jumped.

I looked too. There was nothing there. We waited, the deer and I, now that I was also curious about what was coming. If it was coyotes, well, their chances of getting away were far better than mine. Oh well. We waited. It felt like a long time but then another deer appeared and carefully made its way onto the ice.

I exhaled, ‘good, good, they’re together again’ I thought. Except now this deer stopped in the middle and looked back. Another minute passed; we were all still waiting. Finally, a youngish one emerged and ran down to the river. Together the two deer who were likely separated from the herd when it started running happily pranced back to rejoin their family.

Now all ten deer started playing, chasing each other, hopping. Some of the older ones looked annoyed, the babies didn’t much care.

I was smiling, getting up to leave, when they noticed me. Now everyone froze waiting to see what I would do. I waved, I know, absurd, but I did, I waved enthusiastically and yelled to them to have a wonderful day. They stood still a second longer then started jumping one by one into the brush.  

 “In life you can either laugh or cry,” my mother used to say to me, “and I’ve done enough crying.”

Yes, it really was that simple. ‘I’ve done enough crying’, I thought, it’s really time to laugh more, to be happy in what’s there, to find wonder in what might appear wonderless.

Minutes later I came upon the deer to whom I declared my veganism.