Fawns Enter...

Two years ago after our oldest's Senior Awards Dinner had ended. I drove us home, feeling a sense of satisfaction, as she held her awards on her lap. She had achieved Valedictorian as my husband and I felt was a possibility. Yet, unfortunately he'd passed eleven months prior to the dinner and her graduation from high school. 

When we began the drive home it was dark out. We were traveling through a wooded area when a fawn leaped out in front of our car. Fortunately, I was driving under tte speed limit, wary that such an event could likely occur. 

I stopped in time and the fawn had to not only cross in front of us. It then had to leap over a challenging guardrail for its youth and size. It stutter-stepped. It tried twice to leap over the obstacle. And finally made it over the guardrail to join its mother.

Two years later, the other evening, our youngest daughter and I were on our way to her Senior Awards High School Dinner. About 200 meters from the entrance to the event's location, a fawn raced in front of our car. Again, I just happened to be traveling under the speed limit. The fawn easily arrived safely to the woods to the right of our path. At the time, I hadn't time to reflect. Only to say, "That was the smallest fawn I've ever seen." But as I parked our car, the apparent deja vu moment creeped into my mind. Only soon to be forgotten with nearly three hours of eating, clapping, listening to speakers and hearing names of students receiving awards.

Our youngest had just missed being the Valedictorian. Unlike her sister two years before. Yet she still landed in the most noblest position of Salutorian. Along with a combination that night of 23 awards and scholarships. After having already received four awards/scholarships in the past three weeks, not including the scholarship and grant that the university she will be attending has given her. 

We were stunned to say the least, of her accomplishments and the awards she'd just received.  

Soon we were parting from the crowd of parents and students in the darkness of the parking lot. It was near ten o'clock at night. I knew I'd have to watch for deer as I drove the ten minute ride back home. It was relatively quiet in the car. Quiet enough to have a reflective moment of the significance of what was transpiring in those moments now being unfolded before us. The beginning of futures that held a certain synchronization of the nature that intertwines us humans to all living things around us. Nature calls for the infinity of futures. ---Jody-Lynn Reicher