Bear in/on tree

[Yipes. Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

It’s a plastic yard ornament, perhaps seven feet from the ground. I pass this bear almost every day when I’m out walking. It spooked me the first time. It spooks me still. Here is a cute version, which also spooks me. I am easily spooked.

In the past week or so, I’ve also seen two deer running through the yard twenty yards from where I mowed, another deer standing ten feet from our front door, a fox sunning itself in our driveway, a raccoon glaring at me from the end of our breezeway, and a turkey vulture taking flight with a dead squirrel in its mouth. That’s enough nature.

[I’ve seen real bears in the wild once: a mother and children crossing a road early one morning in the Berkshires. I brake for bears.]