I hung a mounted deer rack proudly over our men's room urinal. I thought these deer antlers wouldn't be a bother. But bother they were, as being petite I thought I was hanging them high; instead they were right there at eye level for every 6 foot plus gentleman to eyeball.
Suffice it to say, it was a conversation piece, it was intended to be.
This trophy, a deer bagged from an Alaskan island, was a gift from a long lost love. And now, they are gone, taken.
Here is their story:
When I was a teenage girl, my parents only fear was that someday I would come home with a long haired, motorcycle guy wearing a leather jacket.
Of course, I did just that; and was eventually forbidden to see him. Which is odd coming from my typically opened minded parents, but in their defense he was often in trouble.
This boy was from the wrong side of the highway. Abandoned by his mother in the 1960s, his father sent him to live with his grandmother, "Nan." She was a Maniac raised on a solitary island in Maine.
We met on a school bus on the south shore of Massachusetts.
He didn't shower me with gifts, instead, actions. For example, I lived in a snug harbor next door to a Congregational Church in our small town. Churches were never locked in those days. He would enter that holy building and climb the tower and ring the bells for me.
When I was a senior in high school my family moved away. That first love and I sat together the night before my move in his Volkswagon Beetle and held each other tight, crying into the night.
And then, I moved on.
Years later, a mutual friend, nicknamed Love, arranged for us to meet again before a high school reunion. I know this is a common story, but there was more to it. My friend, who has since died of cancer, had always found it so sad that I had moved away. And she knew his story, as she had dated his brother, a commercial fisherman out of Plymouth, Mass.
On the coldest night of one winter, the two brothers had been fishing off the coast of Massachusetts when their boat started to take on water. My former boyfriend realized the vessel was going down and got the others into shabby survival suits and into a inflatable life raft just cutting the line from lifeboat to their vessel before it was engulfed in sea water, sinking in a flash. Fortunately, he had also grabbed a beacon.
Their survival suits were old and ripped. It was a long night at sea in a raft. My boyfriend said that he was about to give up, and his last thought was that he would never see me again. And then, as all hope was lost their weak signal was picked up by a Russian satellite, which alerted the Coast Guard, who rescued the sorry crew, which, by the way, was captured by the Boston media.
I humored Love and agreed to meet my former. But then, there was this unexpected electricity when we came together. He told me of his rescue at sea, and that he had just wanted to see me one more time.
But at this point in our lives, we were both married to other people.
He was a carpenter living in Maine, who also fished off of Kodiak Island in Alaska when it was salmon season. He had shot that deer from their fishing boat, "The Hungry Raven." He left me with those Sitka Island antlers as a keepsake of our first love. He was also the person who told me that everything done in the dark, eventually comes to light.
So, if you took the antlers and can find it in your heart to return them it would be appreciated. But if not at least you know their story of love lost, and found and lost again.
