My husband, Joseph, and I bought an old farmhouse in rural southwest Washington and have been using every spare minute to spruce up the grounds.

Yesterday, we worked on our koi pond, cleaning it out and installing a fountain to aerate the water for goldfish.

As we moved boulders and trimmed ferns, a young buck meandered around the corner of the greenhouse, eating apples from under the orchard trees. This time of year, lots of young male deer are on their own. The young bucks get drummed out of the herd because the mama does need to put attention on their newborn fawns.

Deer often visit our yard. We keep working and talking and they're pretty used to us. Every evening just before dusk, deer come down in onesies and twosies and clear out all the newly fallen apples from under the trees. Our raised bed gardens are protected by deer netting and we don't mind sharing our apples, so they're not a nuisance to us. Some evenings we see them hunkered down sleeping ten feet from the house where they know they're safe.

Joseph would be mortified if he knew I told you that the grass down in that acre of the yard is about a foot high, but it is. There's SO much to do around here. Mowing grass between the barn, trees, woodshed, and outbuildings doesn't happen frequently, and that's fine with me.

While this little buck grazed away, our youngest kitty, Laser, a year old short-haired tortoiseshell, began sneaking up on him in the tall grass. The deer noticed the rustling grass, picked up his head with a start and stared right at him. Then he moved in Laser's direction. The deer moved slowly, a step every five seconds, till he was two feet away from Laser frozen in the grass.

It's one thing to stealthily stalk a big animal in the tall grass. It's totally another when the animal sees you and heads over to investigate. The two yearlings checked each other out.

The deer stretched his nose out towards Laser, sniff, sniff, sniffing at him as he moved closer until they were just a few feet apart, which was apparently a bit too close for Laser, who suddenly leaped straight backwards and hightailed it behind the greenhouse.

The deer went back to munching more grass, slowly moseying over into the ferns where our orange long-haired girlcat, Grrretya, had holed up in her hiding place watching.

We've seen Grrretya stalking deer before, but from a good twenty feet away, and never has a deer noticed her. We've seen her hiding in the ferns and tiptoe-tippy-toeing around on her pink panther feet, running bush to bush behind them as the deer browse the yard.

But this time the deer saw her. The little buck browsed to the ferns, closer and closer as wide-eyed Grrretya backed up (tail straight up!) until she backed herself into the corner of the greenhouse wall with nowhere to go. She froze in the ferns and, sure enough, as she stood stiff-legged and wide-eyed, she got snuffled!

Our eldest cat, Daniel, wanted nothing to do with the entire deer adventure and stayed behind our ankles the entire time.

My mom's city cat, Jasper, is visiting for the summer and he was "curious as a cat" when the deer came into view. He clambered up on top of the grape arbor so he could watch what was going on. The little deer eventually made his way over to the arbor and grazed alongside.

Jasper stepped carefully onto the arbor edge and balanced on the top board edge parallel to the young buck as it grazed. The buck raised his head to Jasper on the arbor, at eye level. From a foot away, they stared into each other's eyes. Simultaneously they leaned forward and kissed noses!

In the next minute, we all went back to our tasks -- cats dozing, us mucking about in the pond, and the deer finishing off apples further up in the field. It looked like just another average day on the farm, but we'll always remember it as the day Jasper got his first kiss!

Copyright © Jacqueline Freeman