the deer story....

most of my family and friends know this story but i had a request for it over the weekend, so ali, here you go... in june of 2000, the friday before father's day, we had only been in our new house for about 2 months as it was a brand new subdivision. i was working at a scrapbook store in rochester hills and worked late on tuesday and friday nights for crops. on tuesday's i usually got home at about 11 pm. on friday's i didn't get home until about 1:00 am. on this particular night in june 2000, i was coming home. unknown to me at the time, don had woke up at about 12:45 am thinking that it was tuesday and since i wasn't home yet, he thought something had happened to me or the car. he came downstairs to check the answering machine to make sure he hadn't missed a call from me. when he got downstairs, he realized that it was friday night, not tuesday night and i actually not due home yet. when i pulled into the subdivision in which many homes were still under construction, a deer ran into the driver's side door of my minivan. it happened so fast that i didn't even see the deer until it hit me. evidently it must have slid under the van and i ended up dragging it down the street. don had actually heard the crash of the deer hitting the van through the open window and thought i had blown a tire. about that time i realized that the deer was still under my van and i didn't want to drag it up into my driveway. i stopped in the middle of the street in front of my house and backed up and then went forward to try and dislodge it from the undercarriage (ugh). while i was forwarding and reversing don started hollering out the window "don't drive on the rim" while frantically pulling on a pair of shorts to come outside because he though the tire had blown out, he didn't realize i was trying to unhook a carcass from the underbelly of my car. i pulled into the driveway sans deer and got out of the car a hysterical mess. the deer was in the middle of the street shuddering and spasming (dying) in front of me. don came out of the house looking at the deer in the middle of the street in a moment of stunned silence. "WTF is this, i thought you blew a tire", he said to me. i just kept telling him to go and get a gun so he could put this animal out of its misery. that would have been hard since we don't own a gun so i went into the house and called the police. i really didn't know what else to do. i felt so bad that this had happened and the police said they would be here in about 20 minutes. while waiting for them i sat in my upstairs bedroom laying awake in bed. i heard a car coming down the street and thought it was the police so i went to the window and saw our new next door neighbors we had only met once (who were on the way home from their honeymoon) stop in the middle of the street in front of the deer and get out of the car staring down at it. i yelled out the window "i killed it" and started crying again. one hour later the police finally showed up. by this time i had changed into my pajamas so i went out to meet them {in my pj's} and had to sit in the back of the police car {in my pj's} and had the police officer write his report while i was in my pj's... i was really worried about it being in the middle of the street and embarressed that it was in front of my house, so the police officer told me he would drag it into the back part of the sub that hadn't been built out yet and was just a huge field. it was then that i heard austen crying from the upstairs window. apparently the commotion outside woke him up and we weren't in the house and he panicked. don went in to tend him while i finished up with the police guy. i went up to bed and was awaken the next morning by the sound of a dog frantically barking in front of my house. i looked out the window and saw our other new neighbors across the street from us staring at a dead deer on their front yard. apparently the deer was too heavy for the officer to drag very far so he dragged it out of the street up on to their property. i ran out of the house in my pj's mortified that the officer put the deer on their property. they had only moved in a couple of days earlier and their first thought was someone had purposely dumped the deer on their property because they had had such a bad closing on their old house and they thought this was revenge on them. again i had to admit that i had killed the poor thing. they were laughing and actually relieved that it was me and not the realtor from their old house. they suggested that we rename our subdivision (which was deer creek estates) to kill deer creek estates. this story actually gets better (can you believe that??). i had a family get together planned for austen's birthday and father's day combined the next day and had this deer carcass on the neighbors property (right near the curb) at the end of my driveway. since it was dead since friday night, and it was really hot, the fetid carcass started to bloat and stink. it was the favorite gathering spot for the boys in the neighborhood who had apparently never seen a dead deer close up. i had called the city to try and have the body disposed of but they were closed for the weekend. i called the city again on monday to have them take care of it but they told me it would take "a few days". a few days???? this was a subdivision with children running around. it was soon obvious that they were never coming to take care of it. because they were still building houses in our subdivision, don talked one of the bobcat drivers to scoop the carcass up and take it to the woods in the back of the subdivision's unbuilt area. after he and don struggled to get the thing up into the bucket of the bobcat he took it back and disposed of it for us. the funny thing is, we were talking to one of our neighbors about 4 years after this happened and he was telling us how while digging an area on the back of his property for a playscape for his kids he came across what his kids thought were dinosaur bones. you guessed it, it was our deer. incredible but true....and for months (years) i was known as the deer killer in our subdivision.