Happy Sunday!

It's so beautiful here,
so warm and damp outside,
(a good rock-collecting day...),
I'de say, it would be a great day
to be born, or re-born,
(or just outside)
as the case may be.

The dog was sniffing on the river trail,
back behind the colleges here in Rice Lake.
It's where I found the small deer (antler) shed, last year. Thought I'd stepped on a rock down in the heavy brush off the side trail, which is off the walking trail itself, on a deer trail running on the ridge parallel to the water. (Buddy was getting a drink, and I'd followed him in.)

So I look down to see what my shoe had hit -- thought it might be a river rock worth checking its color (I collect for pipestone and all good-looking red-colored pieces that catch my interest; bad habit, come home with a pocketful and now have coffee cans full for that rock garden, someday... ;-)

But back to our story:
there it was, the one-inch tip of a tine, peeking out of the ground. I dug around, and found my first shed! (People go seasons actively looking for these, and often walking past.) Maybe the mud had preserved it, because with the little critters, they can get knawed at fast. It is nothing big really, sitting now on the top of my bookshelf under the decorative sign my mother gave me one year: "May the Peace of the Wilderness Be With You..." (She knows me.)

The single antler I found pales in comparison to the two -- not a matched set -- my father came across years ago in his walks in Thornton's (Ill.) forest preserves (in Cook County, in the southern suburbs).

They are 8 pointers, nice to wrap your middle-finger and thumb around, and just smoothly slide along. Big, limestone-grown tines, off of deer in a protected preserve that are allowed to age, (un?)naturally. They aren't there, the large herd, anymore, Dad tells me. The forest preserve people hunted them off, not because they were being hit by cars, but for some calculated reason, I'm sure. Native plant protection, perhaps, or some other well-intended reason.

Point is, he gifted them to me, and I didn't realize what I had, until Mal's youngest nephew was awed by their size, and I realized they were indeed large by the size of deer harvested up here. Majestic bucks. They look nice, with the new one too, sitting up on my bookshelf.

I hope you get outside today, even if you don't fill your pockets with rocks or find a decent deer shed. But if you do, well you've got a friend in Wisconsin too!

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PS. I had to temporarily break my vow of hiatus; look at that calendar: it's such a balanced mid-March Day!


ADDED: Joke of the Day, courtesy President Obama at last night's Gridiron Dinner:

But for all the gaffes, all the slip-ups, I think 2016 will come down to the issues. For example, equal pay. Did you know that the average male presidential candidate earns $150,000 less per speech than a woman doing the same job? (Laughter.) It’s terrible. We got to fix that.