Devonne Brown

They were all red yesterday. The bright red bloom of every flower around the base of the tree was gone. Deer. They waited until I planted the flat of flowers around the base of the tree before touching the blossoms. The flat sat in the middle of the bare flowerbed, like a loaded charcuterie board and it was never touched. The minute I put the flowers in the ground and turned my back, the miserable forest hippies had lunch. 

The deer never bothered the flowers last summer, not once. I had even come to think they were deer resistant, but they weren’t. My son kept them away last year with a secret weapon. A repellent stronger than you can buy at the hardware store, cheaper than Irish Spring Soap, and you didn’t have to put it on a stick either. 

Ian’s happy place was the back porch, spitting distance from a giant oak tree surrounded by scarlet red impatiens, Bizzy Lizzies, whose only job was to bloom and be beautiful. He’d spend hours reading from the rocker, reading, listening to the sounds of the forest, enjoying the natural world at will. It was a convenient step from inside the family room where he spent most of the time completing his senior year of college. He could open the door to the porch to the sea of red flowers, green forest, and bluebirds to reduce high stress remote learning brain freeze. He’d pick up the watering can, let the soothing white noise from the spigot fill the bucket wash over him, and spend a few minutes soaking the petals until they glistened. It soothed him.

The flowers flourished, I had taught him everything he knew about flower tending. I had a notion why the deer didn’t eat his flower salad either.

I called him after he graduated from his home confinement.

“Ian, when you were studying from the family room during the pandemic and tended so well to my flowers, did you happen to pee off of the porch?” I asked. Moms can ask questions like that to their adult boys.

“Well, yeah Mom. Why would I go all the way to the bathroom when there was a perfectly good tree right outside. Duh, Mom,” said Ian with his usual amount of love and adoration for me in his voice.

Deer repellent, all you need is a boy.