Check the freezer, deer
If not bound by the rigors of daily life and children and
jobs, my husband and I would be fantastic hobbyists. I can’t wait until we retire and have time to
tackle all of the projects we have dreamed up, started, paused, and
abandoned. For as excited we are to do
things like bake all of our own bread and build our own furniture, the sad
reality is that we can’t find enough hours in the day.
But still, we try.
I am the child of a family who always had a freezer full of
food in the basement. Slabs of beef,
frozen peppers and tomatoes. Pies,
casseroles, leftover pizza, soup.
Nothing ever went to waste and we always had a stockpile of food in a
subterranean deep freeze.
My married life is no different. Our chest freezer is full of Girl Scout
cookies, bulk meat purchases, the forty seven thousand containers of applesauce
that I’ve made and accumulated over the years, and enough strawberry jam that
would require a truckload of peanut butter.
We purchase quick frozen entrees for those especially busy nights, and
there’s always a mysterious container of something that has gone without label
for an unidentified period of time.
“Why write what it is on the outside of the clear bag?” we
often chuckle. And then regret.
But our freezer now contains something that is definitely
unmistakable.
My hunter husband snagged a decent buck last fall, but not
quite amazing enough to shell out the money for it to be properly stuffed and
mounted. “I’ve been doing research on
the European mount,” he told me. Then he
explained that it was a method of removing all of the flesh and fur and just
leaving a full skull and antlers. It
was a craft project, a disgusting one, but a bit of hobby coming back into our
scheduled lives. I was happy for him. I was dreaming about retirement.
“Oh, by the way, the entire deer head is in the freezer
downstairs,” he mentioned as he walked away.
From the neck all the way to the tippy tip of the
antlers. Wrapped in a white garbage bag,
unmarked, and sitting on top of my applesauce.
And there this beast has stayed, for months now, as we
venture down the basement stairs to retrieve something from under the
decapitation. He says it’s too cold to
complete his project, and given the winter we’ve had, I have to believe he’s
honest.
So week after week, I find myself maneuvering around this
beheaded beast in the deep freeze of my basement, its head surrounded by the
rest of his body in one form or the other.
Vegetarians beware, wives of hunters smile and nod in complete
understanding, and our uncle reminds me, “A deer in the freezer is better than
a horse in the bed.”
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