We arrived at the cabin about 10 pm on Friday night and were amazed at the moonless sky. There must have been a gazillion stars and the Milky Way was obvious. When you live in a city like Nashville, TN, you do well to see a few stars and the moon. The ambient light blocks out everything.

Saturday morning we sat on the deck for coffee. A squirrel came along, looking for peanuts. Since roasted or raw peanuts in the shell are not to be found in Kroger, he had to satisfy himself with the spilled sunflower seeds that remained after I filled bird feeders. We’ll get some peanuts when we go into town on Monday.

After the squirrel gave us a talking to and left, a bald eagle landed in a pine tree down front. Of course, it didn’t stay long enough to get its picture taken. Not long after the bald eagle left (by this time we had cameras outside) a bear cub wandered by, not far from the pine tree. It didn’t stay long enough to get its picture taken. We waited for the mother bear to show up, but she never came.

Everyone knows you don’t get between a mother bear and her cub, so we continued to drink our coffee. The other reason Jim didn’t want to look for the mother bear was that he was afraid the cub might be an orphan and I would want to take it home to be a playmate for the cats.

It was cute and it would be fun having a bear cub in the house. But getting it through US Customs might be a problem. First, I don’t think you can take live animals across the border. That means we would have to try to pass it off as our child who has severe thyroid problems. How else would we explain its excessive hairiness? But, a child needs a passport and we don’t have one for it.

Passing off a bear cub as a hairy child isn’t a problem. The last time our friend, Denny, was here, he left a fleece jacket. Denny weighs a little more than the 200 pounds I estimate the bear to weigh, and he’s much taller than the cub. We could put the jacket on the cub, zip it up, and pull up the hood. Add a pair of paint-covered sweatpants, some socks, and there you go – instant child. The sound you hear is Jim groaning at another one of my creative ideas.