Mom's Christmas Deer
When Mom was eighty-four, she and the family cat and I traveled together from her nice hillside house near Ventura, California to Taos, New Mexico where we rented an adobe casita for the winter.
Taos is an old village near the Rio Grande River Gorge on the western slope of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
Mom had been born about 70 miles away in Las Vegas, New Mexico, on the sunrise side of the same mountains.
I landed a winter job at Taos Ski Valley. I like working at ski lifts ‘cause you get paid and you get to ski free.
Mom dearly loved New Mexico. She had worked in the Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce at the time the State had been officially named: “The Land of Enchantment”, and she had put the state’s sun symbol (Zia) in red tiles on her garden goldfish pond on “Laughing Mountain” near Ventura.
Mom loved the outdoor life. She loved a campfire and roughing it. I think she was a good mother for my two brothers and myself because she really did like to do “boy” things--not organized sport so much as just “outdoor” things--which was natural for her since my grandfather had been a real cowboy when he was young and he had loved to hunt and fish and camp out. And she thought her father was wonderful.
Grandpa was not only a hunter, but he liked to draw and paint a little too. I remember a painting he did of a buck deer that I liked as a boy. He had made the picture in blue; silver and black house paint and hung it on the outside of his house trailer in Sunland California so we always saw it when we visited he and Grandma.
Mom had had several small strokes and was getting very frail, but she still had a lot of spunk. We had towed her almost-new white Toyota behind my very old Ford camper to Taos and we would drive in one or the other of the vehicles up into the mountains almost every day--usually taking her car since the gas mileage was so much better--but sometimes using my camper so we could cook a meal “in the wild”.
Christmas was coming and we thought it would be good fun to go up into the Kit Carson National Forest and find our own Christmas tree like we had done when I was a kid, so we got a five-dollar Forest Service “cutting permit” and one bright, sunny afternoon, drove up into the mountains. About ten miles out of town I parked the car and we went through a barbed wire fence into a stand of trees. We soon found a perfect one-about five feet high and with a nice shape-growing out of a little snow bank. I cut it with the saw I had brought and in high spirits we walked back to the car.
I started the engine and Mom said: “Wait a minute--there’s a deer!”
I looked back over my shoulder and, sure enough, there was a magnificent buck with a big rack watching us from the forest side of the wire fence. I hadn’t seen a deer like that for a long time and neither had she. The deer took a good, long look at us and then slowly began to move away, picking up speed and finally gracefully bounding up a steep hillside and into the trees.
When I put the tree up in our cozy little living room and we had decorated it with lights it was just splendid. “And just to think,” Mom said, “our tree and that deer lived right together in the forest.”
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