It’s an early August evening. The sun is bright, the sky flat blue. I’m waiting at the stoplight to get on Route 29 from the neighborhood where I’ve been visiting a friend. There are woods across the road for half a mile in either direction. They form a solid wall, except for the section straight ahead of me where a huge chunk was cut out thirty years ago for a bypass that never came. The cut is 100 yards wide and 300 yards deep, carved out as carefully as a piece from a pan of brownies. Because the highway department has been mowing this swathe regularly — and hopefully — for all of those thirty years, it’s become a rich green meadow lined on three sides with straight walls of thirty-foot trees.
As I sit there, a young deer suddenly bounces out of the woods halfway on the right. It gambols in tight half circles, jumping, twisting, kicking up its back legs.
Tan and graceful against the bright green on the grass, it dances from the sheer joy of being alive. After a few seconds, it disappears into the trees as suddenly as it bounded out of them.
The light changes, I turn left down the highway. I smile all the way home, my own joy of life reawakened by that tiny dancing deer.
Very nice!
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