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Who's Afraid of a Big Bad Bear
Rev. Brooke Vernon Grant
CMC Minister #101
I live in "black bear country" of western Pennsylvania on 144 acres of woods not too far from a thriving Amish community. My nearest neighbor lives several hundred yards away. Since I love to interact with the wild birds of the area, I put up a bird-feeder, which hangs about ten feet from my kitchen window and also five feet from my front porch. I tell you this because one of the other fringe benefits of this is that some black bears regularly visit the bird-feeder and my front porch.
"My" bears love to eat black oil sun-flower seeds; and they also love to rearrange my porch furniture. They do that on most visits to the bird-feeder, which I mention again, is only a few feet from my front porch door. In the last three years, the bears have knocked down the feeder more than a dozen times and stole the metal cage feeder twice. It was several months later, when the leaves had fallen from the trees that I discovered one of the missing feeders hiding about 80 yards from the house in the woods. The other feeder is still A.W.O.L.
During the time that the feeders were "stolen," I would sometimes sadly imagine a frustrated bear with his/her head stuck inside the metal cage feeder, like Don Quixote jousting with gas wells in the woods which are "kinda" like windmills. Sometimes my imagination would do role reversals with the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but in my story the three bears come to my house and eat all the porridge bird seeds and then wreck my porch furniture (or at least move it around a bit).
One evening, just two weeks prior to my signing up to take the A Course in Miracles Ministerial Program from the Community Miracles Center, I cooked up a huge beef bone for my 80 pound, part pit-bull, muscle dog, Sunshine-Adventure. Sometimes I forget and call her Forgiveness, which is the name of my previous shepard collie dog who died a few months before I got Sunshine-Adventure from the same rescue center. Unbeknownst to me at the time, this new dog was brought into the shelter on the same day that my old dog had died. What a coincidence since we know not to argue about reincarnation.
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