First, just the facts. This photo features my mother, my niece Avery, and my parents' dog Gretchen. I'll leave it to you to figure out which is which. The location is the garage of my parents' house in Belgrade Lakes, Maine. I don't know the exact date, but I think it was Summer 2002. Now, if you view this picture, several questions may come to mind. Why is Avery so delighted? What is in that bucket in front of her? And what is that pile of bags on the right in the foreground? As for the first question, one can only speculate. But this girl is quite young, and if you view the other photos on this site you'll see her being delighted at all sorts of things, so let's just say it doesn't take much. But, the other two questions I can definitively answer. The bucket and bags contain the same thing -- deer food. My dear (ha!) mother has it in her head that she must feed all wild deer in the state of Maine. She brings multiple buckets (the side of which you can observe in this photo) to a feeding spot near our house. That's a lot of deer food, which brings us to the bags. As you can see, that's a pretty big pile of the bags. What you may not realize is that it extends several feet beyond the edge of this photograph. My parents own a big pickup truck, and my mother fills the bed of it with these bags. And the bed of the truck is covered, so they can stack it all the way to the top of that. Let me tell you a story about this deer food. My brother Matt and I were home for Christmas in 2002. One night before we went to sleep, she told us that she'd purchased deer food that day, and we'd need to unload it the next day. Until that point I hadn't really been aware of how much deer food she bought. I mean, I knew she fed them frequently, but somehow I had just never seen the deer food stash. Evidently Matt hadn't either, or so I think. So anyway, the next day I woke up around 3pm. Matt and I had a friend Nick spending the night (he is pictured in other pictures, if you want to look for him), and he also slept late. I had completely forgotten about the deer food, because our mother told us about it when we were playing a computer game. Anyway, at dinnertime Nick went out to the garage to get a soda (we don't need to refrigerate them in Maine -- keeping them in the garage suffices), and when he came back in he was laughing. He commented that he had no idea how Matt had moved all that deer food by himself. I had to go see, and when I opened the garage door, I was amazed. The pile was higher than in this photo...it had to be multiple tons of the stuff. I'm kinda surprised the house didn't collapse into its foundations or something. And Matt had moved it all himself, over the course of an hour or two. That's how long it took! What we all found even more amazing is that my poor father (77 at the time) had been carrying this in for my mother, when me and Matt weren't around. So there's the secret to his longevity. Plenty of hard, back-breaking labor. And it's all for the deer. I don't even want to tell you how much money my mother blows on deer food per month. It's unbelievable.