FIND the BEAR POO

"The best of summer gone, and the new Fall not yet born. The odd uneven time..." - Sylvia Plath

"There's a bear. Find the bear". My father  skooshed leaves at me. Every fall we'd look for the bear. The bear hiding in the forest that surrounded our house. I would shriek in delight.

My parents always put me in an ugly , brown snowsuit. Good for finding bears, apparently.But I looked like a piece of bear poo.

I hated that snowsuit. But it was required uniform in which to hunt for bears............

"Bear poo! Bear poo!" I hollered. 

"Sssssh, " said my father, looking towards the door.  My mother would come out on the steps. We smiled at her. Big grins. Not doing nothing we were. Till she went back inside.

 "This is the last time!" she said,  before she went inside, shaking her head, I imagined.

My father  picked up a stick and knighted me. We played Robin Hood. He was Robin. I was a princess.  I jumped into the pile of leaves that was my castle. My father pretended he had been mortally wounded.

I healed him with a shower of leaves. If only it would have been that simple in the real world.

He told me to go off on  a quest. I galloped off with the stick, as if I was on a horse. A white horse with a pink mane and gold ribbons.

Ready to thwart evil.  To find the bear. There was a bear out here . Somewhere.

My father called me back. He had been miraculously healed. The magic of the leaves.

He pointed to a spot.  " Here! Here!" I climbed off my horse. My snowsuit was hot, but I wanted to see what he had found. We moved aside the leaves and found.........

"Bear Poo! Bear Poo!"  There was a blob of scat under the leaves.  Definitely bear.

Actually, it was cat scat, from our two outdoor cats . It was hilarious.

It was obviously a very big bear. Gave us incentive to go stalking in the brush  and hunt. Till dinner was called. My father and I would call out "Bear Poo! Bear Poo!" as we came inside. He tracked in leaves. I waddled in with my brown bear poo suit. My mother's eyes twinkled.

There were only so many autumns left that we tried to find that bear. Till  his very  last year I dumped leaves over him, and even though I grew out of that horrid suit we  saved the world countless times. It was magic. And once, after we found the bear poo, we we met that bear, hiding in the forest, waiting to join in the game.....

Photographs vintage and 2021