Bark

I was walking on a beach when I heard a bark. I turned around, expecting to see a dog. I did see a brown creature, and thought, briefly, that it was a large dog. It was a deer. It was four deer in a meadow. We watched each other for a while, then they continued to graze.

The beach was on an island, off another island; it was a two-bridge-island beach. I was the only human on the beach. COVID-19 dented the touristy influx, and drizzly 50-degree weather kept away the wise locals. So just me and the deer in the meadow. And the yellow rockweed, purple irises, large soft-edged slabs of pink granite, gray sky and waves, raucous crows, soaring seagulls, and bobbing daisies. The beach was U-shaped, with sand at the nadir of the U and pink granite sides. The spruce and pine forest came right down to the granite on one side, the other side was a bog and a long stretch of flat granite shoreline. There was a yellow boulder, shaped like a corn muffin. Lobster boats chugged past. The beach was a good place for buried thoughts to come bubbling up for inspection, but after four months of COVID isolation, I'm pretty much cleaned out of repressed memories and regrets.