"Oh, oh, what I want to know, where does the time go?" Grateful Dead

When will this rainy springtime end? Wait, it doesn't feel like it, but it is actually summer.Where has this summer gone? I start school in only three weeks, and the kids start right after I do. We have only been to the pool a few times, and if you divide the number of times we have used the pool by the cost of the pool membership, it has been something like a hundred bucks a visit! What has happened to the sunshine?

I have several huge tomato plants, but no fruit on any of them. My zucchini plants are producing, but their leaves are soggy and yellow. My zinnias still have not bloomed. My peas finally gave off some pods last week. Peas in late July? It has been a very odd season.

We have noticed that there are very few coyotes this year. For the past two summers we have had a large pack of them yipping outside our bedroom windows at night, and I have seen them when driving both at night and in the wee hours of the morning. This year, my neighbors and I have not heard them.

We do have a resident mama deer and two fawns in our yard each day. We also see a mama turkey and her six chicks. Yesterday we sat at the end of the driveway waiting for them to follow the mama across the road so we could turn in. It was so funny watching them start to cross, then run into the grass, then start to cross, then run again.

It has been reported that last week, over near my cousin's house, someone in a small pickup stuck hit an 800 pound female bear. That's huge! Usually a black bears are between 250 and 350 pounds. According to the DEC an adult male could weigh 600 pounds, but this is rare. The locals here tell me that none of them ever remember hearing of a bear that large. The poor bear did not survive the accident.

One thing we know for sure is that there is a bear in our yard on a regular basis, although I am sure the one in our yard is much smaller. I know he is here because he does not seem to like to poop in the woods. He prefers to come over to my place to leave his scat.

Last week, early in the morning, Eden came running in the house exclaiming, "There's a bear in the apple tree!" So, I go wake Harrison (the boy who always sleeps late) and Dennis grabs his camera and his longest lens and we all tip-toe onto the front porch and look down the hill to the apple trees.

We see nothing.
We wait.
Dennis begins his walk through the yard to get a closer look. Nothing.
Dennis goes far enough down the hill to worry me, and I call him back.
He holds his ground.
Nothing.
We watch in silence for ten minutes. Finally, Dennis says, "There's no bear in the apple tree!" and turns to walk back to the house. He takes three steps and WHAM! The tree began to violently shake! I mean I thought it was going to rip apart. It did not look like there was a bear in the tree - it looked like there were a couple of gorillas shaking the tree! Dennis ran back to the porch and I almost wet my pants.

We watched this violent shaking of the tree on and off for the better part of the morning. Finally it stopped. Still, we could see no bear.

Eventually, we piled into the mini van and drove down to the street with our binoculars where we could get a better look. The bear had torn off some of the upper branches and made a nest. If one looked very closely, one could see black between the leaves, but he had woven this nest so tightly that if we had been just walking by, we would have walked right under the tree and never known he was there.

Eden suspected that it was two cubs, because we got motion from two parts of the tree. I think it was one bear and we could see the motion in two places because the limb he was on would shake while he ripped off the higher branches. Our apple trees are about 80 years old, and they are not in good shape. Sometimes I think they are only standing because the poison ivy vines keep them up.

We took shifts watching the tree all day. The limb he was on sank lower as the day progressed, until at dusk it was almost touching the ground and I was wondering if it was going to snap and dump him right out. Sometime during the night, he vacated. We never got a good look at him.