When we came here, there was a fence. Standard issue, subdivision allowed, six foot wood fence, slightly rotting from the ground up, due to poor maintenance and the generally shitty quality of builder grade fences. Beyond the fence there were woods – partially ours and beautiful. Standing outside the fence it seemed like we owned a park. “We’re taking the fence down”, my husband said. “It will make everything open.” Looking back, our naivete was almost awe inspiring. The stuff dreams are made of. We didn’t hear the laughter.

It had to happen. The open space, the beautiful woods, the building of year round blooms in the garden. Stopped. Infested. Like mold, slugs or blight. But worse.
Deer.

The deer are like other insidious garden destroyers. Like grubs, or chipmunks. But bigger. And more clever. And much more snide. Sarcastic even. More annoying and arrogant. More knowing (like how your mother knows you’re up to something but lives 800 miles away). But stupid. Unable to cross a street without meeting headlights straight on. And potentially less driven (chipmunks are very driven).

And so the battle began.

The deer started with one, maybe two, small heads peaking into the yard. Not even in the garden, just from the corner of the woods. Noses high. They are simply admirers. (Posers. Imposters.)

Until they are not. Then they are like deer-shaped guerilla fighters. In. Destroy. Out. Keep watching. Laughing in the woods. A deer laugh.

I am a mere mortal, spreading wolf pee all over the yard until every dog in the neighborhood senses the pack is near and start to howl. Believing this works, but knowing it doesn’t, as the ghost deer take out the green sprouts of lilies and all the Lenten roses. Next, they consume a summer buffet of begonias, inpatients, daisies. This is followed by a sumptuous fall feast of coleus, Rose-of-Sharon, anything that flowers – and even those that don’t. Down to the roots. Bark stripped.

We stalk each other. They prance in groups boldly into the hostas along the path; dinner-party of eight, please. I clap, chase, and shoot marbles at them (clearly having lost my own some time ago). They scatter into the woods and laugh their silent deer-laugh at us. My neighbors watch sly-eyed from behind their own fences. Madness follows. And the garden is a wasteland that brings me to tears every time I walk through it. The white name tags of rare lilies and perennials are chewed and scattered, like food left under the table when feeding unruly children. My daily meditation becomes a litany of what isn’t there anymore. Not even the stone gargoyles want to look, turning their backs to what they were there to protect, but failed.

And now, because we must, a fence. My husband builds it day by day. A post, a gate, the rolling of boulders and the transplanting of bushes. Not a wood fence. An ten foot, barely visible, but solidly there, fence. A deer fence. The proverbial line in the sand/woods fence.

It’s early false spring here. The daffodils are breaching the earth. The garden smells green. Of hope. But its early yet. While the Lenten roses are making a show of it, there is more enticing temptation to come. Lilly shoots. Then we’ll see.

And the deer? They watch. Far back in the woods, staying away from the yard as the fence goes up, locking them out, but shitting by the posts because they can, as if to say “So what?”, laughing the silent deer-laugh. Plotting.

I think to myself, are they in or are they out? Which side of the fence are we viewing ourselves from? Who is truly fenced? Who wins this way?

Maybe that’s why the deer laugh.