Nurseling

This is the last pictue I ever took of Sarah. I may have posted it before; it’s the icon for the blog anyway. I took it on August 11, 2022 and Sarah died on August 18. I love looking at pictures of Sarah growing up, seeing how her face and hair changed. When she was very little she always looked like a Mini Max. She came to look more like me too, I think.

She had a bob haircut for a long time and she wanted to grow her hair long so she started doing that in Middle School. She was the victim of so many horrible haircuts. I think stylists just wanted her out of their chair. I remember taking her once to a local salon and a Russian Stylist was really chopping her hair and kept saying “She is big baby.” No, she is not big baby, you are big bitch.

It hurts when I think that I will never take another picture of Sarah again, when I look at the photos on my cell phone for the last year and instead of mainly being Sarah, they are just a few selfies, our trip to the UK, and random shots of this or that. No Sarah at all. It’s a shock every time.

She will never develop beyond last August. Maybe if she had lived she would have wanted to indulge in some of those new trendy brightly colored hair highlights I see kids using, put a bit of blue or green or bright pink in her hair. Maybe she would have wanted to wear a bra, although her breasts were very small. We also had an appointment coming up just the week after she died to get her new eyeglasses. Maybe she would have chosen some really snazzy frames. Who knows.

Yesterday Polly was really agitated and wrought up, first of all because there is a lot of smoke here from the Canadian wildfires and people are being advised not to go out, so her only walk was in the backyard, but also because a mother deer was out on our front lawn for a while. We get a lot of deer around here although it’s pretty citylike. They really don’t have a lot of places to go and a lot of them make a bad end with cars. After the mother had been sniffing around our front lawn for quite a bit, and Polly had been going crazy at the window, I noticed that there was a tiny fawn near the trash cans. The deer got the fawn up and it nursed for a while and then she nudged it over to some big shrubs behind our driveway and I guess hid it in there before she went off to forage more.

I felt really bad for this mother deer and (I feel a little silly to say this) set out some carrots and water for her for when she comes back to check on her nurseling. Hopefully I’m not interfering with the fundamental laws of nature or putting my scent down and screwing up her bonding or recall of her baby or something like that. It’s so hard to be a mother and care for your tiny one. I really hope everything works out for them and they stay safe.