Dec 9, 2014 3 min read

While watching television the other night, I was distracted when I thought I saw something rather large meander across my patio.

It couldn’t have been any of my three cats because they were sitting in front of the glass door looking outside intently, and none of the three, excepting perhaps one of them, approached the size of my nighttime visitor.

And, when the cats are outside and do happen to go by the door they are usually in hunting mode, and they seldom stop to look in the room unless they want back inside.

This creature, though, soon returned from whatever mission it was on, and again my television viewing was disrupted when I gazed at a huge buck, with its nose nearly pressed against the glass, looking directly at me.

The cats, or course, were unfazed. I sat there, waiting for it to take a few steps backward and charge through the glass. Of course, it didn’t. It went back to what brought it to my backyard – acorns.

Having a giant oak tree standing no more than 10 feet from the corner of the house can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the skewered perception of this homeowner.

In the spring and especially in the summer, the tree provides a canopy of shade over the patio. In the fall, its leaves, which turn from green to an unpleasant brown hue, are always the last to drop, making raking duties extend beyond Thanksgiving.

Now, this is not a young tree. I believe it was planted when the house was built, sometime in the early 1950s, making it more than 60 years old. Yet, each spring it buds and the leaves appear, and in the fall, those wonderful deer magnets known as acorns let go and pelt the roof and gutters.

Most, though, fall in the yard, and once squirrels get their fill and bury them for winter’s survival, something I have a hard time believing since I have never seen a squirrel dig up a buried acorn in a culinary frenzy, the deer start arriving and graze for those oak-producing nuggets.

Forget the proverb, “Mighty oaks from little acorns grow.” This oak came from a nursery.

Perhaps the proverb should be rewritten: “Big bucks get bigger by eating acorns just feet from the television.”

I suppose I should be grateful that, come spring, the hundreds of acorns that plummeted to the ground, aided by some rather gusty winds, are gone, except for those that didn’t make it to the ground and end up in the gutters.

Eat up, Mr. Buck, because when they are gone, they are gone. There are no dishes of acorns waiting for you inside.

Jon Stevens, Greene County bureau chief, can be reached at jstevens@observer-reporter.com.