So I’ve moved house, into our new and beautiful home surrounded by woods and fields, and nature just drips from the eaves with redolence. Our first morning in the new house, we spotted an 8-point buck that had come to the stream to drink. Memo to self: do NOT mention to any hunter friends, else I might discover blinds in the trees in the near future. Two days later, we spy his harem of five does a-wandering in the empty lot next door. One of them, with a black stripe down her back, I recognize later when she’s sauntering across the road I’m trying to drive on. Two days after that, when we go stomping through said woods on a family walk, it becomes a Very Special Episode.

There are many times in my life where a freezing walk has resulted in a major life event. The first night Mr. Xandra and I spent together was in rundown, ought-to-be-condemned student housing in college during a snowstorm, without functioning heat. We didn’t really notice though, as we were young enough and randy enough to make our own heat. :3 Then in another February, eleven years ago in fact, Mr. Xandra and I took a walk out onto a frozen fountain where he got down on one knee and asked me to set a date.

But this year, in addition to giving me a beautiful home with enough closet space for all my old manuscripts and a woods full of natural inspiration for my muse, Mr. Xandra gave me magickal communion with nature. And that magickal communion with Nature just wouldn’t be complete without a confrontation with the far curve of the Circle of Life in the form of a half-eaten-down-to-the-bone DEAD-ASS CARCASS!

“Holycrapwhatthehellisthat!” says Mr. Xandra while on our walk. Attracted by the bleach-white bone and bright red bloody meat, he plunges off the path and into the brush by the stream, brandishing a convenient and hastily acquired hunk of tree branch, because you just can’t have a dead body around without wanting to poke it with a stick. Number One Son goes haring off after him, and I’m left on the path with The Girl, both of us staring down at the severed and frozen-bloody limb I just noticed I was about to step on before the detour, and me noticing the tufts of bloody hair and tissue dotting the trail like an amateurly-plotted CSI episode, showing how the body was, at one point, dragged downstream, only some parts seem to have made it further than others.

“Wow, neat! Look, Dad!” shouts Number One Son excitedly. He’s just been given a precious gift of Something Really Gross that will keep the entire preschool class enraptured for weeks. Poor Miss Debbie. I don’t envy her this. I can only imagine the parent-teacher conferences resulting from the artwork generated by this one. Every mother in the class will undoubtedly hate me for this.

“Don’t let The Boy near that thing!” I shout. “It’s full of germs!” Even though attending preschool has pretty much inoculated The Boy against most forms of rampaging creeping crud out there. But I still don’t want him dragging dead carcass cooties into my brand new house, where his little sister will likely think the Best. Game. Ever. involves putting something of it in her mouth.

“It’s too cold for germs,” Mr. Nanook of the North says.

“It ain’t too cold for gross,” I retort.

“It’s the circle of life,” the Mister insists, then proceeds to show Number One Son just how the ribcage protects–or in the case of dead things and highly motivated and hungry scavengers, fails to protect–the innards of an animal.

I’m really grateful that we decided to take this walk in the below-freezing temperatures. At least when your nostrils are frozen shut, you can’t smell how old the dead thing might be. Or how fresh.

I’m sure that Elton John sure as hell wasn’t thinking about this when he was writing for the Lion King. Although I bet with lions around instead of just coyotes and raccoons and the occasional carnivorously feral squirrel, that carcass would have just been a skeleton and a lot less…meaty.

I love Nature!

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