Walk on the Wild Side

For my walk on Monday I decided I would go backwards. Not the actual walking but the route. Instead of my usual Colonial, Cliffwood, Yankee, Gov. Bradford and back to Colonial, I chose Colonial, Gov. Bradford, Yankee, Cliffwood and back to Colonial.
In ten years of this being my route it's never occurred to me to walk it in this direction. I felt like George in the Seinfeld episode where he vows to do the exact opposite of all the things he usually does.
So I'm going along, and truthfully it's a little disorienting. All the houses look askew when approached from the opposite direction - familiar yet unfamiliar.
I come out on Cliffwood and I'm a few houses down from the intersection of Cliffwood and Yankee when I see this deer on a lawn to my left. The deer is casually eating grass in someone's front yard unperturbed by my presence. I stop and look up and down the street, searching for someone else with whom I can collaborate this story as I've never, in many nights of walking, seen a deer on someone's front lawn. Alas, just as it was when I saw the dinosaur-sized snapping turtle on the bikepath, no one else was about.
With no one else to witness the deer I began to question it myself. Maybe I was having a Harry Potter moment (because all my metaphors have to elude to outdated cultural references) and the deer was actually a patronous like Harry's stag or Snapes silver doe (Whoops. Spoiler. Hope you've read book 7).
In other nature-related news, yesterday while trimming what passes for shrubs in front of the house I found two bird nests. C found another three when he got home from school. As per my friend Laird's suggestion we put them in the microwave to kill any mites or other small bugs that might be living in them. Small birds do not return to their nests (because of the vermin) so there's no guilt in fall nest collecting.
On my suggestion C checked out some cool scat in the backyard by the shed. I think I should like to be remembered someday as the mother who pointed out cool scat to her son.
I had a second Harry Potter moment, less than 24 hours after the first at the bus stop when I commented to C that the black wispy cloud that was floating rapidly by in front of the large fluffy white one looked like a dementor. A dementor! C, the boy who rereads Harry Potter books like the ending might change if his eyes just bore into the book long enough, seemed unmoved by my keen observation.
Perhaps he was busy trying to conjure up his own patronous.

song: Walk on the Wild Side • artist: Lou Reed