When I was growing up in Schroeder we had a baby deer. Not the kind of deer you keep in a pen or a cage, but the kind of baby deer that decided he
wanted to be our pet.
He came and went as he pleased. He would run through the yard to meet my brother and me when we went outside to play. My parents believed that his mother must have been killed because we never saw any sign of her.
We named him “Bambi” of course, even though we had never actually watched the movie. The closest movie theater was in Two Harbors at the time and that was over an hour away from our house. I can count the total number of movies I saw as a child on both hands. To the dismay of my sweetest neighbor I have not to this day seen the Disney movie version of Bambi.
I tell her, I had the real thing, why would I want to see a cartoon?
Now to be fully honest with you, Bambi was probably not drawn to me and my brother as much as he was attracted to my Grandma Allard’s apple orchard. She had lots and lots of apple trees. We would try to count them all but we always got confused and argued as to which trees we had counted and which trees we had not. There were so many different kinds we would have taste tests and then use the sour apples for apple bombs on our aunties and uncle when they got off the school bus. It wasn’t until years later when we learned the game of apple smear. (Old apples and a tennis racket can make quite a mess.)
Sadly our Bambi disappeared one fall and did not come back. We even put an old red hanky around his neck so hunters would know he was a pet. He might have returned as a full grown buck and we didn’t recognize him. But to this day when I see the new fawns tumbling out of the woods I think of Bambi and of apples!
Any fool can count the seeds
in one apple but only God can
count the apples from one
seed.
Robert H. Schuller
Tastes Like Home columnist Sandy (Anderson) Holthaus lives on an alpaca farm in South Haven, MN with her husband, Michael,
and their children Zoe, Jack and Ben. Her heart remains on the North Shore where she grew up with her parents, Art and LaVonne
Anderson of Schroeder. She enjoys writing about her childhood and mixes memories with delicious helpings of home-style recipes.
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