Eight-Point Buck

     As I stated in my welcome, my sense of wonder began in the woods. And with the coming of that sense of wonder also came a sense of home. Even though I was only a toddler, I somehow knew right then and there that the woods is my true home.

     That certainty has never left me. So, I am extraordinarily lucky. Because I now live in same woods I once rode through as a small child on my father’s shoulders. My true home is the forest of a small, hidden valley known as Lightfall Hollow.

     Lightfall Hollow began for me sixty some odd years ago with my maternal uncle. An avid woodsman, he had been driving around the Allegheny Mountains of south-central Pennsylvania for well over a year, searching for a wilderness property to purchase as a hunting ground at the rock-bottom price that was all he and the other six members of his hunt club could afford. He had not even come close to finding land that was for sale, dirt cheap, and the Allegheny mountain forest of his dreams, when he turned into an old, deserted, almost impassable dirt road and drove up a small, narrow, secluded glen that was heavily shaded by the deep hardwood forest growing inside her.

     About a mile up that dirt road through that little woodland hollow, standing where is now the middle of the pond he and my father later built, my uncle spotted an eight-point buck. Afterwards, my uncle always said that deer was a sign. That he knew right then and there Lightfall Hollow was the wild realm of his dreams.

     I cherish that vision. Because it indicates that my uncle, much like myself, while riding through the hollow experienced a magical moment of wonder and home.

     That mutual wonder and home has created an unbreakable and enduring bond for my uncle and me. Although he has been dead for well over two decades, my uncle is always with me. Together, we are at home in the hollow. And every day, I look out at the pond he and my father built and imagine the ghost of an eight-point buck.

     Then there is what I see each night. It’s funny, but shortly after we married, my husband, to whom I had not yet told the story about my uncle and the eight-point buck, designed, constructed, and placed in the middle of the pond where that deer once stood a floating halo of eight solar lights. I look at that halo of eight lights falling on the water, reflecting, and shining through the dark, and I wonder what moved him to do so.

     I wonder, is that halo a sign?

     I don’t know. But I do wonder.

     All that I know for certain is, in a world where so much of the time it is dark, a sense of wonder and home is what keeps a spirit alive and brightly burning.

     Happy Halloween!

     I hope you enjoyed the above, my true story of both wonder and spookiness. And I hope you come back in a couple of weeks and visit me again here in the hollow.