The One With the Bear

I grew up in a house that's backyard was literally a forest.  I spent hours and hours hiking around in the wilderness that was behind my house.  It was really, really special.  Not everyone gets to spend hours exploring the redwoods right in their own back yard.

That is what I looked like and those are the people I explored with.

Having a forest as a backyard also meant we had more than just our pet animals in our yard.  We would get deer, various birds, and we even had a cougar scare one year.  We also had a resident bear.

The bear would come and eat the fruit off of our trees.  It would lay in our yard and scratch itself.  It would sometimes just sit there.  And I know this because my mother would wake my brother and me up every time it was in our yard.  Every.  Single.  Time.  It got to the point where we had to not so politely ask her to stop waking us up because the bear was doing the same thing and it had stopped being exciting.  

This is us taking a selfie last winter and has nothing to do with the story except that we are in the woods.

So imagine the horrible flashback I had when boyfriend ran into the room at 12:30 this morning shaking me awake because there was a bear on our porch.  I no longer live where there is a forest in my backyard.  I live in a residential area.  So, even though I had to be up in 4 hours, I hopped out of bed to see this in action.  Sure enough.  There was a bear.  Eating the apples right by our living room window.

So that was my excitement for the week.  I have no idea why the bear decided to venture out of its home.  Maybe because we had already picked the apples and it was too lazy to pick its own?  I couldn't believe my childhood was coming back full force.  And my mom?  She was actually upset that he didn't wake her up to see the bear.  I think she has a slight obsession.