Published in Tidal Echoes 2008 and laJoie Journal , Spring 2009
A bear visited us one morning last summer. She—I assume it was a she as this bear certainly knew her way around a kitchen—pushed open the front door and padded through the dining room right into the kitchen. I know this because when I walked down the stairs that morning at 6AM thinking about whether I wanted oatmeal or eggs for breakfast, the front door was wide open and there was a trail of empty bottles and wrappers leading from the kitchen to the front door. Even though the trail seemed to indicate that she had left, I tiptoed into the living room and the computer room. There was no sign of a bear. I felt so astonished. And awed too. A bear…inside? It is true that we do live on the lower slopes of a mountain that is black bear habitat and bears do wander through our neighborhood in the summer. Outside.
Back in the kitchen, one drawer and two cabinet doors were open. Nothing else was disturbed except the tall salt and pepper grinders she had knocked down in her Winnie-the-Pooh eagerness to get to the plastic bottle of honey on the counter. She found the brown sugar too. It had been in a cabinet in a moveable kitchen island that she had pushed across the floor. On top of it was a precious teapot, a blue Quimper belonging to my late mother-in-law, and she hadn’t swept it off. Instead, she had deliberately opened the cabinet doors on the right, ignoring the cabinet doors on the other side where only pots and pans resided, and dragged out the bag of brown sugar and consumed all of it. She had also found a bag of what looked like white sugar, but in fact was sea salt. She carried it as far as the front door, bit into it and left it on the hall floor. From the drawer, the only one of six containing food, she had fished out a bag full of chocolate chips, finished them off and then started in on the squares of baking chocolate. She left those with the sea salt. I could understand her position. Who hasn’t tried a bite of baking chocolate and been bitterly disappointed? Next to the stove, she found the green butter dish and licked it clean, leaving only a single black hair, solid evidence of her presence along with delicate muddy toe prints on the floor. What a particular bear she was!
I didn’t feel violated by the bear, as I might have by a human. She was just doing what comes naturally. She had also broken into our locked “bear proof” garbage shed on the deck as easily as can be by ignoring the locks and splitting the wooden door from the bottom, pulling the garbage bags out and strewing them all over the deck and into the street. That must have been before she noticed the front door. I imagine her as an opportunist. Our front door must have been ajar. Now after 25 years of leaving it unlocked, we have had to start locking it at night. I’d rather it was because of a bear than a person. After all, she is governed by natural laws.
A visit from the wild made that day extraordinary. I guess I might not have been so admiring if it had been squirrels or rats coming to visit. They’re wild too. But a bear occupies another category. A bear has mythological proportions… and I feel a kinship with bears. It’s easy to imagine bears as us… and us as bears. And this bear had a sweet tooth just like me. She hadn’t left me any brown sugar for my oatmeal. So I ate eggs instead—still thrilled that she had chosen my kitchen to visit.
