The fawns are harder to spot this year.
Our frost-seeded clover on the new trails has drawn the deer deeper into the woods. Where once spotted fawns tottered across the open lawn behind their mothers, searching for clover among the grass, now they remain hidden in the forest shadows, making it nearly impossible to count this year’s newborns.
Last year brought three fawns—and sorrow.
One morning, a new mother appeared outside my bedroom window. A healthy fawn wobbled beside her, but something dark trailed beneath her white tail. As the light rose, it revealed a haunting truth: a tiny black hoof dangled from the end of a lifeless leg. Her second fawn had been breech-born—hind legs first—and died during birth. Its tiny, limp body remained half-trapped inside her womb.
Days stretched into weeks. The scent of death arrived before she did. Another small leg soon emerged, the dead fawn’s limbs flopping behind her as she wandered on increasingly stiff legs. Despite her obvious suffering, she returned each day—eating, nursing her living fawn, and enduring.
As summer’s heat intensified, her pain became more visible. She allowed us within feet of her as she sunned her swollen belly near the garage. We debated intervening. Attempting to capture her seemed both impossible and potentially cruel. Calls to veterinarians and the township yielded only one solution: a sharpshooter. Perhaps that would have been a merciful end for the mother, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to orphan her nursing fawn. So, we hoped, for just a little while longer.
As the dangling remains blackened and shriveled after nearly a month, her eyes dulled. Pain and devotion had hollowed her out, left her thin. Her walking slowed, her steps unsteady. We began closing the garage doors, knowing that dying animals often seek shelter before the end.
Then, one morning—it was over.
Though still perilously thin, she stood tall on the lawn, her fawn nuzzling close. The grim appendage was gone. Some nocturnal battle had been fought and won in the darkness, witnessed only by the living trees.
As I write this, rain has begun to fall.
Raindrops trace slow paths down the windowpanes. They fall on the valley’s slopes, drain through the yard into the stream, wind toward the Delaware River, then to the wide bay, and finally to the Atlantic Ocean.
Each raindrop, considered alone, tells a tragic story. It begins as cloud. Then, grown too heavy for the sky to hold, it falls—shattering on the earth. Some land directly in the stream, but most struggle to find it. They lose their jewel-like form—splashing, surrendering themselves: a trickle, a puddle, a rush of water down a gutter, mixing with dirt as they soak into the ground. Some are drawn into plants or licked from leaves by thirsty squirrels, their journey to the sea delayed for weeks—or decades—as they seep toward the bedrock. Some evaporate before they ever reach the wider water, returning to the sky, becoming cloud once more, beginning again.
But a raindrop is never just itself—it is water: ancient, eternal, circulating in countless forms since the first rains fell on barren stone. The same molecules that once filled dinosaur tracks now sleep in winter ice, awaken in spring floods, and rise as morning mist. As water—as life—there is no true tragedy. Only transformation. Only the sacred cycle of becoming. Only the silver music of rain on leaves. Only the breathy secrets of fog-wrapped valleys. Only the laughter of a running brook. Only the timeless rhythm of waves on sand.
Look closely at the horrors of this world.
Hold them kindly, patiently. Hold them with the same stillness and compassion you would offer a sick child. Sit with them in the soft dusk of understanding. Let them breathe against your palm like a wounded bird. Just listen. When you’re ready, their thousand twisted faces will turn to you and whisper one simple truth:
All suffering lives only in the fleeting particular— the eternal whole flows on, alive, unbroken, perfect, luminous, complete.