Bear Market Expands

All this spring and summer, I’ve been very careful about mixing the fresh compost thoroughly into the older compost. In the past, we have occasionally had trouble with bears tipping the container over but now that we have a resident bear, it seemed greater caution was called for. And it’s been successful. Or maybe I’ve just been lucky.

This morning, I went out, dumped a pail of coffee grounds and apple cores and egg shells and potato peelings into the compost, sifted a little of the old, and shoveled four shovels-full of the old compost on top of the new, then mixed it all round with one of those compost tools that involve a long metal rod with two half arrows at the bottom for thoroughly displacing compost, and returned to the house, ready to get on with my daily tasks. I do this, when I do this, in the morning because bears are nocturnal, I read, and thus there is a greater opportunity to have the bear-appealing scents dissipate before the bear gets there in the middle of the night.

Alas, the bear and I are reading different books. The bear has been all over the financial system these past weeks and now he’s outside our kitchen door well before noon, as well. Not a half hour passed from my outside work until Ed walked out the door, interrupting bear in his work. In the first photo, bear has already knocked the top half of the compost container off and is working—apparently not all that successfully—to find something to eat. That was the good effect of my work, I guess. In the second photo, he has given up on the compost and is trying to eat the tire on the wheel barrow.

We whooped and hollered (after getting the camera), but he proved largely indifferent to our noisiness as well as our nearness (we’re about 12 feet away from him at most). Once, he looked up at us, but with exceeding boredom...kind of like, 'Do I know you? No, I don't think so.' Then, after about five minutes, he wandered off, around the corner of the house and across the front yard, crowning his bearish behavior by walking right through a small hydrangea bush and breaking off the strong stick that supported it.

Well, as Jennifer Lopez once said, ‘The bear is what we all wrestle with. Everybody has their bear in life. It's about conquering that bear and letting him go.’ I don’t know the occasion for this philosophizing by Ms. Lopez--apparently the music business--but I think that I’ll let the bear go but just pass on the conquering.