But this year … oh, deer.

Pat Detmer

If you live in Newcastle, I know you’ve had the deer experience. You learn to adapt. I only grow Hosta and Huechera in pots on the deck and fully expect fresh tulips to be beheaded before sunset. I finally gave up and pulled out a plant that had served as their salad bar for so many years that I could no longer ID it. California Lilac? Yum! Lemon Cypress Tree? Our compliments to the chef! I always ask the helpful garden folks at Newcastle Fruit & Produce if plants are deer-resistant before I buy them, but lately they just laugh. I understand why. If our local deer are hungry enough, there’s nothing they won’t eat. Except, unfortunately, Bishop’s Weed.

We recently took out an overgrown fir that was blocking the sun. Suddenly the little Witch Hazel tree I’d poked in that corner a decade ago had some space, and it gratefully stretched out its limbs. Every morning I admired its wide and airy growth habit through the kitchen window. It was a survivor. Very lovely. Very Zen.

Last week, Newcastle Niece brought Jack over for a visit. She came tearing in the front door saying that three deer were coming across our front yard and headed for the back, and she wanted Jack to see them. I know this group well, a doe and her two juvenile delinquents. We ran to the kitchen window and stood Jack on the counter. Jack was excited. I was not, because to my horror, they began to wander toward a spot they’d never been before: back in the corner, by my Beautiful! Witch! Hazel!

That was it! For the first time since moving here 25 years ago, I felt the need to startle a deer. I tore out the back door clapping my hands like Grandmother used to do when she wanted us to wake up during summer visits. The deer startled (just like us) jumped a fence, and headed for the greenbelt. But it was too late. In a few short seconds, they had de-leafed half of my tenacious little tree.

Today, they took the other half.

This means war.

You can reach Pat Detmer — who believes that this is a war she will eventually lose — through patdetmer.com.

There was another “Boom” in Seattle before the “Legion of.” It was the “Sonic Boom,” and I signed up for for a decade of fanaticism. I’d moved to Seattle in ’72 from small-town Illinois, where basketball was king, where winters were so harsh and bleak that the best option for entertainment was to be packed into frigid cinder-block gyms in the dead of January to watch sons of farmers play the game. I transferred my basketball fan punchcard to Seattle and started listening to Bob Blackburn on the radio, and daily scanned the sports pages for stories about the SuperSonics in all three newspapers. Yes. Three.

I was ecstatic when they began to win and make the playoffs, and I committed myself completely to the journey. In my saved box of Sonic history are newspaper clippings, a poem of mine that had been published (“Goodbye, Marvin; No Hard Feelings!”) and a front-page picture of myself and friends holding up a banner during the Denver playoff series (“We Got ‘em by the Nuggets!”).

I had absolutely no business spending my hard-earned money on season tickets, but I did it anyway, investing in them with my best friend, a school teacher who somehow managed to convince Sonic management that she was a professional photographer, so I would hang with her courtside pre-game, and be admitted to downtown building roofs open only to the press, perfect vantage points for the post-season parades. I still have the 8-by-10 black-and-white glossies from those.

I was employed in a highly seasonal industry at the time, and days off during busy times were verboten unless somebody in your immediate family died. I was a prototypical German Catholic uber-worker, but in spite of that, when the Sonic siren called out to me, I couldn’t resist. I marched into the general manager’s office and said, “Fire me if you have to, but I’m going to the parade.”

Later there were more connections to the team: My sister briefly dated Jack Sikma, and I helped P.I. sports reporter Blaine Johnson write a book about the Bill Russell years called “What’s Happenin'”.

Besides the newspaper clips, there’s a gold “World Champs” T-shirt, a hardbound NBA Sonics Yearbook and a vinyl LP featuring “exciting play-by-play highlights, interviews, Sonic songs and the post-season celebration!”… historical artifacts that I’ve faithfully retained, and like my memories, easy to access. Except for the “Sonic songs.” I don’t remember those at all.

So if you believe you’ll never get over the Super Bowl, think again. Consider my Sonics experience. Today I recall only the fun, the highs, the shared insanity, the car horns honking in the night, waiting in the rain for playoff tickets with other zealots, all the good stuff; and I remember absolutely nothing of the losses, none of the lows, the disappointments, not even the pain of losing the Sonics altogether.

And just think: The Seahawks have only begun.

You can reach Pat Detmer — who may fire up the phonograph to hear those Sonic songs — at patdetmer@aol.com.

Jack and the ice cream man. Uh, woman. Truck. Small open vehicle.

I recently wrote an article about the overhyped tests that you can take to find out how old you really are. Who needs a test? While watching my 32-month-old grandnephew Jack a few weeks ago, I easily found out how old I really am, and discovered the same about him.

I am 8. Jack is 52.

Jack is a very smart, thoughtful and cautious child who went directly from observant silence to sentences like, “Mom, did you play with dollhouses when you were a little girl?” and who often begins conversations with, “Mom, I have an idea …”

I watch him every Tuesday for a few hours, and on that day several weeks ago, the stars aligned, the Summer Gods smiled and the ice cream truck came to our neighborhood while I had him. Jack was at the kitchen table eating blueberry yogurt when I heard the unmistakable sound of summer treats approaching. I popped up from my chair and cried, “The ice cream man! The ice cream truck!” Jack looked up from his yogurt. “Jack! The ice cream man is coming! The truck is on the way! Can you hear it?”

Jack heard something all right: me, yelling at full volume from three feet away.

Grabbing some money and heading out the door, I asked The Sainted One to keep an eye on our charge. I ran down our steep driveway and looked up the street. The truck was stopped at a cul-de-sac north of us, and our Good Neighbor to the West and her Lovely Daughter were paying for their purchases. I ran back up the hill, grabbed Jack from the porch where he was now waiting, and tugged him towards the street, but before we could get there, the truck took a tight turn and puttered away from us.

Hearing my wail of dismay, Lovely Daughter chased it up the street and around the corner but had no luck finding it. At the same time, The Sainted One was backing down the driveway to go to the store. Or so he thought. His new mission was to follow the sound of the truck and bring it back.

Jack and I hurried up to the main street so that we wouldn’t be bypassed, with me jabbering the whole way about summer and ice cream men and trucks. Within minutes, the truck slowly approached us with my husband in the car behind it, pushing it along like a sheepdog herding Merino sheep. Jack solemnly held my hand as the parade approached. I could almost hear his thoughts:

“I’m pretty sure that’s not a truck. I can’t define precisely what it is, but it is not a truck.”

“That is not a man. I distinctly remember hearing ‘ice cream man,’ but that is a woman.”

“That is not ice cream as I know it. Where is the ice cream? I see only frozen treats.”

Because Jack remained mute, I followed the suggestion of the ice cream woman and bought him a cartoon character Popsicle featuring bulging blue jawbreaker eyes that scared the hell out of him. He wouldn’t touch it. The next Tuesday, I chopped it up, put it in a bowl and gave it to him with a spoon. He liked it just fine.

You can reach Pat Detmer — who also used to get very excited when Santa came by in the fire truck — at patdetmer@aol.com.

I’ve said it here before: If The Sainted One ever tried to build a house, he would bleed to death from unintentional stabs and slices.

He is the Official Family Chef, but has knives that can’t cut through gelatin without effort because I won’t let him have anything sharper. There’s a secret spot in the garage where I’ve hidden a  Japanese hand hoe that will chop the most stubborn greenery into submission, and although I could use help in the garden battling the weeds, I love him too much to let him near it.

Even the simple act of checking out a bed frame …

I have this thing about the master bed frame. It’s adjustable, and every so often it will loosen, widen, and allow the box springs and mattress to drop. Admittedly, if I could measure that drop it would likely be about 15 microns or so, but it’s so startling when it happens that I am absolutely sure the whole bed will fall to the floor and continue down into the family room.

When this occurs, I conscript The Sainted One — who could sleep through a 7.5 earthquake — into helping me pull off the mattress and box springs and check it out. Every time I gaze at the exposed frame with its multiple sturdy crossbeams, I try to burn that visual into my memory, because what I see before me is proof positive that it’s physically impossible for everything to fall to the floor. But besides having no patience, I also have no memory, so every once in a while we have this little bed frame adventure together, and we never, ever tire of it.

We stripped the bed and flipped the top mattress up against the armoire. It used to stand at attention, but after years of use, the mattress has lost its spine, so I had to back up against it and throw my arms out to keep it from falling on my husband and the bed frame he was inspecting. After some hammering (I do allow him the occasional use of the ball peen variety) and pushing on the frame, he grunted and ran from the room.

Trembling under the weight of the mattress, I called to see if he was alright. He said he was, but as soon as I let the mattress fall, I could see that he wasn’t. I’ve done enough weekend guilty-pleasure watching of “Forensic Files” to be able to read blood spatter:  impact pattern on the wall, drip trail into the bathroom.

No blood transfusions or stitches were necessary, but I’m considering a proviso for his upcoming 75th birthday party: Gifts OK. No sharp objects, please!

That was the night the Seahawks game was delayed due to a freak windstorm, and to get to Qwest Field, it had to get across Eastern Washington — and Lake Roosevelt — first.

It was hot and still when we retired early, so I was pleased when a breeze blew through the open stateroom window until that breeze grew into something less appealing. Staggering out of our staterooms, we had to hold onto the walls to keep from hitting the deck. We turned on our phones and they began simultaneously ringing: High wind warning, the messages from the marina said. Batten down the hatches, because something wicked this way comes.

It was so bad, in fact, that we actually did a Sitcom Couch. In sitcoms, three or four people will end up sitting on a couch together because it’s the only way to frame a shot that captures everyone, but really, have you ever seen that happen in real life? Well, it happened that night. The four of us sat shoulder to shoulder, eyes wide, as the Good Ship Vacation was battered by wind and waves. We ended up sideways on the beach, and the next day it took us an hour to extricate ourselves.

Early March, same group, different place: the Anza Borrego Desert on a guided overnight trip. The tents were mesh so that you could watch the stars crawl across the sky. The mesh was not as nifty when the windstorm came out of nowhere, because it acted as a sieve. Only the very finest sand fell through the tent roofs and blanketed everyone and everything underneath it. It was a mighty wind, and another mighty wind (we had stopped for Mexican food before the trip, and it included refried beans) blew beside me.

When we emerged the next morning, I expected our guides to dismiss the storm and call us city slickers for our worry, but they were amazed and — almost literally — blown away. They ‘d slept outside, and their cots had been lifted into the air. It was wild and unexpected, and they’d never seen anything like it in their 30 combined years of guiding.

Then I wondered … is it us? Is it me? I thought of other vacations: In Albuquerque, gazing out the hotel window at a cloudless night sky as the outdoor furniture by the pool is picked up by the wind and pushed to one corner; Galena, watching tornado warnings on TV; dodging more tornados on a trip to Missouri and southern Illinois; at Westport, where the wind was so strong that we couldn’t see the beach for the sand whipping, knee-high, around our feet.

Am I a force of nature? Is the Sainted One? Whatever the reason, true to my sales and marketing consulting background I’ve decided to monetize this, so for a small fee, we will provide you with our vacation itineraries for 2014 and 2015 so that you can avoid blowing in the wind.

You can reach Pat Detmer — who will be blowing into a vacation spot to be named later — at patdetmer@aol.com.

This particular column has to do with a recent “Paint and Sip” adventure. You may have heard of these: “paint and sip” or “paint and pour” or — my favorite moniker — “Arts & Carafes,” where a group of people recreate a painting under the tutelage of an artist and under the influence of alcohol.

For Christmas, my nephew gifted my sister Barb with tickets for one of these evenings, paying also for myself and our other sister Susie. It had all the elements for potential fun/disaster: my sisters, alcohol and a task best done sober, Jackson Pollock notwithstanding.

Our goal, along with 20 or so other artist wannabes, was to recreate an impressionistic-like painting of a field of tulips. Each of us was provided with an easel, canvas, brushes and a paper plate filled with pools of primary paint colors. Music was playing in the background, the wait staff was quick and attentive, and the food was good.

Our artist-in-residence began with instructions. Unfortunately, I’ve always had a problem with authority figures and following directions, which explains why nothing in my house works the way it should and why nuns and CEOs eventually tire of me, so when the instructor said to mix the paints on our paper plate to create green and spread it all over the canvas or use a pointillist method, everyone followed his directions.

I was surrounded by green-washed and dotted canvases, while I — true to my contrary nature — chose to daub. Then, he told us how to create the tulip shapes. I ignored him and did something else entirely.

“Hmm,” he said when he made the rounds. “No one has ever done anything like that before. Never. No one.”

I couldn’t tell if he was impressed or if he was thinking that I would be well-served by spending some serious money on a Freudian analyst.

Several glasses of champagne later, we were done, and as I looked at my sisters’ efforts I once again wondered if Mother had cheated my father. Could we possibly be of the same bloodline? Barb’s was a lovely wash of pastels, Susie’s was packed with busy tulips vying for attention and mine … mine looked like the opening frames of a horror movie about bivalve mollusks capturing and torturing each other a la’ Vlad the Impaler: clams stuck sideways on a stick, frothing white and bleeding blue. It scared me, and I’m the one who created it.

But, what the hell … I’ve hung it on my office wall anyway. It’s behind me when I’m on the computer.

Uh … I think it’s watching me …

You can reach Pat Detmer — who does not fear painting, but does fear what she produced — at patdetmer@aol.com.

In time I became familiar with defeat, and always attempted to be gracious and magnanimous, so I feel especially comfortable in Seattle, the bridesmaid but never the bride, close but no cigar, loud but no Lombardi. The Sonics left, the Mariners disappoint and the Seahawks … well, the Seahawks …

My God, the Seahawks.

There were many Super Bowl parties in Olympus on that fateful day. By pre-arrangement, two parties on our street decided that every time the Hawks scored, we would run to our respective front doors, throw them open and cheer at each other. At the beginning, it went according to plan, but after a field goal, one group did not appear. At halftime, I marched up to their door, demanding that we clarify the rules. After intense negotiations, it was decided that we would not cheer after a mere field goal, nor after six points were scored. We would mutually cheer ONLY when seven points were officially on the board. I went back to our party to report, and the very next play was Harvin returning the kickoff 87 yards. The rules went out the window, and everyone immediately headed for the door.

I’d felt for a long time that the Seahawks were a team of destiny, and a few minutes later I was so sure of it that I once again headed to the neighborhood parties, announcing that when we won — and we would — there would be a celebration in the cul-de-sac near our home. Then I headed to the grocery store (you could shoot a cannon down the aisles and harm nothing save for the crickets I could hear chirping in the background) and bought Champagne, plastic glasses and football cookies.

When the game ended, The Sainted One — who exhibits cat-like tendencies when it comes to getting wet or cold — bitterly complained as we hauled the party to the cul-de-sac, saying that no one would venture out on such a frigid night. Oh ye of little faith! “Wait,” I said.

And sure enough, they came. Coats were grabbed, doors opened, flashlights held by celebrants bobbed their way up the street. Champagne corks popped, cars honked as they passed. Fifteen people, tops. Fifteen minutes, tops.

Worth every frozen second.

You can reach Pat Detmer — who admittedly normally has difficulty sitting still through a whole game of anything — at patdetmer@aol.com

Lenny was the only dog in a string of three homes that included the GNS, ourselves and the GNN (Good Neighbors to the North.) He was generally a benign addition. I can’t remember ever chasing him from the yard, or replacing an upended plant or shoveling up his leavings.

But once past puppyhood, Lenny decided that we were the enemy, and he began barking at us when he thought we were doing something particularly heinous, like breathing or existing in the same universe. If I petted him while he was out walking with a family member, he behaved like a perfect gentledog, but if he encountered us unescorted, he expressed his angry disapproval. He never attacked or made moves toward us (that took too much energy for a dog slung so close to the ground); he just braced himself on his sturdy little legs and barked.

On the rare occasion when he might make it to the top of our driveway, a “Hey, Lenny! What are you doing here?” would be answered with a furious volley as if we were reaching into his food dish with a massive ladle. If he was in the backyard when The Sainted One replenished the bird feeders, he would woof like he’d spotted someone headed for the windows of his house with a ladder and a pry bar. The Sainted One would gently call out, “#^<?!*#!, Lenny, it’s me, for crying out loud!!! We just did this last week!!!”

Lenny provided fodder for an ongoing joke. For many years we’ve had a Good Neighbor Christmas gathering, and once we’d settled down with our first drink in hand, someone would ask, “So … just how old is Lenny now?” And then we’d all laugh. The implication was obvious: How many more years would Lenny be angered by our existence?

Even though that’s been our party opener for almost a decade, it was still a shock to get an early January email from the GNS:

Lenny has left the building. We’ve ushered our little man out of this world. It was very sad, but we’re grateful that we could hold him as he left. For 13 ½ years, he’s been an important part of our little family, and he always will be. And not to worry — he was a smart dog — he always knew you were laughing with him, not at him.

I shared the news with The Sainted One, and as I did so — to my great surprise — I wept.

Lenny, in the end I guess the joke was on me.

You can reach Pat Detmer — who didn’t chase Lenny but does chase cats away from the bird feeders — through www.patdetmer.com.

Knowing that we all sucked at it, 20 years ago we videotaped Mother in the kitchen making pies. I transcribed the session after the fact so that we would have 3×5 recipe cards for reference. In doing so, I literally wrote out exactly what Mom said as she did her demo, thinking it funny and assuming that we would remember what it meant. “After adding the water,” she said (and I carefully hand-printed on the cards) “Go like this.” The videotape has long been lost, and so whatever “this” is has been lost as well.

I asked the Sainted One — who actually knows his way around a grocery store — to pick up the ingredients for this season’s pies: lard (yes! lard!), butter, pumpkin, evaporated milk, and I set to work making the dough the day before and letting it rest in the fridge. That, at least, I’d remembered.

The next day, the two balls of dough had the general consistency of metamorphic rock, but after the addition of a little water and the warmth of my hands, I managed to flatten them enough to accept a well-flowered rolling pin. The first crust looked like a pastry display of tectonic plate movement, with gaps and fractures that I attempted to stitch together. The second was perfect, a thing of beauty, and I began to consider myself quite the baker. I started on the filling, opening the evaporated milk, mixing in the eggs, and adding the pumpkin.

I poured half of it into the bowl before some tiny, baking-aware part of my brain made me stop. The mixture was almost pure liquid. How could the filling ever become firm? What was I doing wrong? Then I realized: The Sainted One did not buy pumpkin. He bought pre-made pumpkin pie filling.

We were due at my sister’s house in two hours and I was looking down at a rolling pumpkin ocean, an orange tsunami. The Sainted One offered to go to the store to get the real thing, but I didn’t have time for that and wasn’t interested in going backward to go forward. I added flour and cornstarch, poured the mixture into the crusts, and put them in the oven.

They actually weren’t bad-looking pies when they came out if you had myopia and stood on the other side of a large, poorly lit room. Up close, they appeared dark and leathery, like they might make beautiful purses, with undissovled cornstarch blooming on the surface.

Looking down at them later, my Army Ranger nephew said, “I’ve walked through Afghanistan at night, but these pies scare me.”

But the crust — perfection!

You can reach Pat Detmer, whose family will never be videotaping her, at patdetmer@aol.com.

I was introduced to the joys of acting in the second grade, when we were barely able to string together decent sentences or walk without tripping. In spite of this, our teacher — who had clearly chosen the wrong profession — had us onstage in powdered wigs and long dresses, reciting lines of dialogue and doing the minuet.

Although the acting part was fun for me, I was most taken with the process of creation. Because of my naturally overbearing and bossy nature, I started directing my sisters in plays that we put on for our parents and anyone in the neighborhood that we could entice with free ice cream and cake.

My greatest acting and directing achievement was “Little Women.” I was Jo. Who else? And little sister Susie, blond like Amy, became Amy. I considered Meg and Beth to be so peripheral to the meat of the story that I had littlest sister Barb play them both.

There was something familiar about Amy vs. Jo in “Little Women.” It felt a lot like Susie vs. Pat in our “Little Family.” Susie was thin and studious, and I was neither of those. Susie was careful with her things — fussy, I thought — and careful with her shoes and clothes, and I was none of those, either. She saved her allowance. She flirted with boys. I was convinced she was adopted.

My version of the play consisted of three acts: Act I, the sisters talking about Christmas, their father and the Civil War; Act III, their father’s triumphant return home. But Act II was the heart of it for me, the climax, the raison d’être: the Jo vs. Amy fight after Amy threw Jo’s story in the fireplace in a fit of selfish rage.

Ahh … That had a ring of familiarity to it (although Susie had never done anything so heinous) and when we rehearsed it, I did so with a zeal that surprised everyone, including me. Louisa Mae Alcott wrote that Jo shook Amy “until her teeth chattered,” and by God, that was the realism I was looking for! I directed and redirected that scene, calling for Susie to chatter her teeth (You think it’s easy? Try doing it on command) and I remember shaking her shoulders, inches from her pale face and wide eyes as she gamely clacked away, her teeth looking a lot like the ones that you wind up and put on a table.

We practiced over and over and over again until I felt we had it just right. It was, however, never presented due to budget constraints and concerns about Child Protective Services.

You can reach Pat Detmer — whose sister Susie loves her, and who loves her sister Susie … seriously! — at patdetmer@aol.com.