Yesterday Dean and Woody went into town to get some Preen (I’m telling you, that stuff works) while I got out my trowel, a bunch of planters and the usual jumble of flowers. Every spring I have the same plan, which is “go buy a bunch of stuff that looks pretty and then come home and try to figure out what to do with it all.”
I spread everything out on the ground, allocated various petunias, geraniums and lantanas to various planters, and had just plunged my trowel into the potting soil to start planting when I heard a rustling noise in the embankment at the edge of our driveway. Oh great, the turkeys were coming to bother me when I was trying to get the planting done. They come up over the embankment and gobble at me until I give them some sunflower seeds.
Except it wasn’t a turkey. It was a black bear, about twenty feet away, looking at me curiously, like he was trying to figure out who I was and whether I’d be delicious. Oh crap. If the door behind me was locked, the only way into the house was up on the deck, and to get there I’d have to walk toward the bear.
When I stood up, the bear looked alarmed and ran off. Well, I was armed with a garden trowel. The door behind me turned out to be unlocked. I did what any sensible person would do when confronted with a bear in the front yard – I got my camera and went out on the deck to see if he felt like posing for a photo op. I heard rustling in the trees and it sounded like he was running off. Guess my trowel looked pretty fearsome.
Dean pulled up a few minutes later and said he’d seen a black bear running up the road just north of our place, going up a narrow gravel lane that heads steeply up into the mountains. So I couldn’t use “bear danger” as an excuse not to get on with the planting. Besides, now I had Woody there on bearwatch duty, and you know how good he is at that.
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