I drove over to Charlie’s Truck Stop this past week to fill up with gas and get a few slices of the thick cheese Jake cuts for sandwiches. When you slap one of those thick slices of cheese Jake cuts between two slices of bread, you have a sandwich that makes most of a meal all by itself. I pulled up in front of the new gas pumps and Jake came bouncing out with a big grin on his chin. When I told him to fill ‘er up, that grin got even wider. One of these days you’d think Jake will just split his face in half with one of his grins. I told Jake I had stopped in to get a big package of his cheese and Jake told me I was in luck. The dairy delivery guy had just brought in a fresh supply of cheese that very morning. It’s not like Jake ever holds onto his cheese long enough for it to grow stale, but it was nice to know I would be getting my package fresh from the cheese factory, or where ever it is Jake’s cheese comes from. Jake was admiring his freshly planted American Elm sapling as he finished filling my tank. I noticed something hanging from the sapling and wandered over to investigate.
“It’s a bar of soap!” Jake yelled. “To keep the fool deer from eating my tree.”
“Daddy has declared war on the predatory deer after he came out early last Sunday morning to find two deer sampling his new American Elm sapling,” Jake’s daughter, Chrissy, said as she came out the front door of the store. “They were investigating and had just decided to make breakfast of the American Elm when Daddy surprised them in their act of vandalism. I never saw anyone move so fast in all my life as Daddy did as he raced back inside for that old shotgun he keeps in a closet upstairs. He was back and loaded for the kill before you could believe it, but of course all the commotion had frightened away the two vandalizing deer.”
Jake looked annoyed and determined all at the same time. He said he wasn’t a big deer hunter, but he wasn’t planning to have an expensive sapling he paid over a hundred dollars for come to nothing more than deer breakfast. Jake wants a good size American Elm out in front of the store exactly like there was years ago before the blight wiped out most every Elm in the country. Jake has no expectation of living to see a fully grown American Elm in front of the store, but he does hope to see a good size tree before the end of his days, that is if he can protect it from the hungry deer. That’s the reason Jake tied the bar of soap to the tree. He read that a bar of soap would act as deer repellant.
Chrissy is down for the Easter weekend with her husband Paul and Ellie, their daughter. Chrissy’s eyes glistened as she looked over the new growth just starting to burst forth as the days warm up. Up in Jersey where Chrissy and her family live it is still Winter cold. Snow is even threatened for the extreme northeast. Chrissy was suggesting she could take her father’s American Elm up to where she lives in the suburbs of Newark. If she planted it in her yard there she would not need to worry about deer coming to nibble at its leaves. In fact, about the only peril in her neighborhood is the occasional stray dog who might decide to use the young sapling for a rest room. Aside from city adapted birds and the occasional squirrel, there is no wild life to speak of in Chrissy’s big city neighborhood.
Oh, it’s exciting in the big city, Chrissy admitted. There’s always something going on, the lights are always on and the police calls wail through the night. But Chrissy sometimes misses the peace and quiet of the small town and the countryside where the most perilous thing you need worry over is a deer eating your freshly planted American Elm sapling. When Chrissy brings Ellie to visit Grandpa, she can allow the child to run loose and get into anything she likes. The possibility of real danger is pretty remote. In Newark, Chrissy and Paul have to be constantly aware of Ellie’s whereabouts and they must keep track of her every move lest someone with truly evil intent should grab her away and harm her.
Another customer had come up and Jake had followed her into the store. I walked with Chrissy across the road to the house facing the store where Jake lived. Chrissy knelt down in the brown grass beside the road and touched the green sprouts peeping up through last year’s dead. On the green shoots were several bright yellow flowers. There was in fact nothing special about the new green sprouts with the bright yellow blooms. They were just weeds. Maureen would be chopping them up when she came out later in the year to tend the lawn. But just now the new shoots were wonderful with the first promise of Spring Farther along the road the first Buttercups were in full bloom. Chrissy picked one and stuck the stem into a buttonhole of her blouse. She wandered through the yard, talking about her childhood growing up and playing in this yard. She never once dreamed in all those years of her youth she would fall in love with a man who would take her away from the simple country life and that she would pass her days in the big stinking and bustling city. Life is funny like that. You never know how the decisions you make will change your life around.
But the big city is nice in a different way. There are live orchestras and concerts, live stage plays provided by talented professionals and the educational opportunities available for Ellie are much more diversified than those available in a small town. On measure, Chrissy is not sure which she would prefer. But the weight that tips the scales is that she is in love with Paul, her husband, and any place he chooses to be is the only place on Earth Chrissy would wish to be. It is her love for Paul that makes the difference and, as always, if Chrissy gets so terribly homesick she can no longer stand it, she can always come back home for a visit.
END
