Friday, February Fifth

I often buy cards that have images that speak to me, often with photographs or paintings by Mainers. My parents did wildlife rehabilitation for years and years--in fact, I live in the renovated woodshed that once housed flying squirrels, a beaver, numerous small mammals, and my kitchen was the deer pen for the fawns. Deer were my mother's specialty. (Dad loved the birds--hawks, owls, ducks, turkey vultures...) Every spring for over twenty years my mother bottle fed a fawn or two or three and we watched them grow. We even had two deer that lived their entire lives in our barn--Sue, because she only had three legs; and Betsy, because her legs were broken when hit by a car. Several times they crated deer in the fall and moved them to the preserve on Swan Island. Sometimes they would simply open the barn doors and release the deer into our own woods.

On this page, the stripey paper anchors the central painted image of the deer in the woods. I added a tag stamped with Tree Frame and a bit of green/brown plaid paper all tied up with twine. I added the saying that was inside the card on top of the tag and overlapped it onto the image a bit. This looks like winter in my woods. In fact, I often see deer across the pond in the woods, we find their tracks in the field, and recently my parents watched a big buck walk across our lawn one afternoon to browse around the apple tree. I live in a magical place and this page captures some of that magic for me.