A Visit from Mr. Bear

      While I was gone in June, first to Sweden and then hiking on Corsica, I asked four nearby neighbors if each would take a week to come to my house once or twice just to check on things. I would water the deck flowers with a timer, so there wouldn't really be anything to do. I just wanted there to be a presence around the house.  

      The four neighbors smilingly agreed and worked out a schedule of who would be here when. I left for Corsica without any worries, either about my house or about an imposition on my neighbors. I didn't think they would have much to do except just to check on things.

     When I got home, Joan told me that one day when she came to check on things, the flower boxes along the front windows were in disarray. A bear had clamored over them to look in the house. The paw prints were evidence: on the window of the writing nook, on the next, bigger window, on the window of my sewing room  

Here the smudge is clearly in the shape of a bear claw, above the sewing machine.

– muddy paw marks at each stop. Then the bear ambled around the corner of the house and stood on his hind legs to peer into the glass door of the bathroom, leaving a smear of six-foot-high paw marks. 

The bear paw mark is in the upper left quadrant. The rest is reflection from outside.

       Joan turned the flower boxes right-side up and cleaned up the loose dirt. When I got home, I wouldn't have known the bear had been there except for the muddy prints on the windows. But when I told Joan how grateful I was to her, she said the person I should really thank was Lauri.

      It was Lauri who thought to make sure all the doors were locked. She found the bathroom door unlocked. She locked it.

      How could I have been so careless as to leave a door unlocked? I remembered going around to all the doors and checking that they were locked before I left the house. 

      Then I remembered: When I got to the car as I was leaving home, I realized I hadn't put my contact lens in, so I came back to the house, and instead of going in the front door, as I generally would, I went in the bathroom door so I wouldn't have to take off my shoes to walk through the house. I seldom use the bathroom as an entrance to the house, so I wasn't doing a habitual thing, and I didn't think to relock the door. I inserted my contact lens, walked out, got in the car, and took off for Sweden.   

      I shudder to think of the damage the bear would have done if Lauri hadn't locked the door for me. In the first place, I think a bear knows how to pull a handle down to open a door, and even if he didn't, it would have been easy for his paw to hit the door handle as he dropped his legs from his upright position – the door would have opened and in he would have gone. He would have wrecked my pantry, at the very least, but probably the whole house, just for the fun of it.

      As it was. though, everything looked normal when I came home. I wouldn't have known there was any bear danger if Joan hadn't told me and I hadn't seen the verifying paw prints of the would-be break-in culprit. So let this be a lesson to me: always, always, double-check that the doors are locked.