Near Death Experience

Let me just preface this post by saying that I don’t live in the country. It takes me 5-7 minutes to drive to the nearest Wal-mart and a mile and a half to reach one of the busiest roads in our town of 50,000 people. I DO live next to an as yet untouched but small piece of forest that is home to all kinds of wildlife.

Pair those facts with my unfenced ¾ of an acre lot and the fact that all the apples that were too high in our trees for us to pick, are now falling like mini-bombs in my backyard and rotting in the grass.

Enter our local herd of elk.

Normally we get the whole herd of about 15 traipsing through our backyard. And I’m constantly blessed by this, because until we moved here, I’d never even seen an elk. We usually watch silently and safely through our big bay window as they graze in our yard and hurdle the neighbors fence.

But during my husbands early morning prayer-walk around our property he came face to face with one of our gigantic visitors and in a moment that my mom will think was total stupidity and that moved me to pray something like this….

“Oh Lord, please don’t let that big thing gore my husband with its ferocious horns!”

Chris decided to try and feed it an apple by hand. And it was really close to doing it too until Chris bent down to pick up another apple and the elk took that as a sign of lowering horns getting ready to charge at it. That was when hubby decided to put a large rhododendron and a very big tree stump between him and the giant animal.

A little too thrilling for me.