Bear Country

 

What are you looking at? That's a photo, taken today,  of our horse corral. It was taken from our neighbor's roof by a roofer working up there.  The horse barn is the structure at the back left and the dark figure just in front is not a horse but a small brown or black bear. 

That's right, a bear. Just chilling in our backyard. (Our house is just out of view to the right.) Dave said, "I think I'll skip my walk outside today." 

Last night I was up in the night, around one a.m. The window was open and I heard a strange sound outside, like a soft grunt. I stopped and listened and heard it repeated three or four times. I went to the glass door to the courtyard and turned on the outside light but there was nothing on the courtyard. I closed the window and went back to bed.

It's not unusual to hear and see animals in and around our house. There are birds and frogs and lizards everywhere. Our neighbors have horses and dogs, of course, that we see all the time. A few nights ago two of their barn cats were fighting on our courtyard, screeching and howling at each other in the middle of the night. (The cats come to the courtyard and patio to drink from the fountain or from the birdbaths.) I turned on the courtyard light and saw one cat run away. I did not see the other and I didn't go outside to look for it either. Cat scratches and bites are serious business. 

We see coyotes regularly, mostly crossing the road but also sometimes in our yard, hunting the rabbits and quail (which we also see regularly). We see squirrels and chipmunks, many of them. We've even seen a mountain lion, cool and sleek, stopping to look at us, too, before walking up our neighbor's driveway.

We are not at a loss for animals around here, but even knowing that, a bear is something else, no? Something special.

Speaking of animals: I've been going through Dave's mother's old paperwork and shredding the documents that don't need to be kept. Among her paperwork are copies of emails that she exchanged with the married man she had a twenty-year-plus long affair with. Dave declined to read them, instructed me to just shred them--and I plan to, of course. But just because Dave doesn't want to read them, doesn't mean I don't want to read them. (I'm not as good a person as Dave or even as good a person as I want to be.)

The letters are something else.  In case you're wondering what kind of people betray their spouses (the affair began two years before Dave's parents separated) without much if any provocation, rest assured that those people are, in this instance at least, selfish and delusional and manipulative. 

Dave's father supposedly never knew--it was a source of conflict between us that Dave chose to never tell his father what was going on--but there are some signs that he had his suspicions. 

Dun-dun-DUN! 

Escandoloso!  

More later.