Resident Bear

I can't imagine not composting, for thirty years I've turned even my personal waste into soil. Becomes a habit. In the fall I recycle bags of leaves I pick up from the curbs in town. Force of habit. I don't turn these piles, I just build them and let them ferment. Human excrement, stove ash, and vegetable matter, let it cook for a couple of years, and the nitrogen, especially, builds to very high levels. The first year you plant in it, you just plant tomatoes, they love hot soil. But the very idea of having a resident bear is intimidating. I've been avoiding relationships for the last ten or twelve years, a brief fling with a fox, but mostly I cling to solitude. I don't want to feel that I have to explain myself, but here's a bear, a young male, looking to establish a territory. I don't want to have him as a regular at my compost pile. TR, D and I played with doll heads most of the day, carefully packing them in foam-lined archival boxes. I might have to buy some kind of tennis shoe or cross-trainer, something cushioned and wide, my feet were killing me at the end of the day. I haven't had a pair of them for forty years, but I have several broken toes now, that I let heal in whatever configuration they found themselves. I understand it's kosher, to end sentences with prepositions. I try not to, but sometimes the circumlocutions are so awkward they embarrass me. If you can think something you should be able to write it. I occasionally play with the concept, pick a mundane chore and describe it in great detail. Mopping, for instance, or returning books to a shelf. Keep it simple: that last storm front missed me to the south; I'm eating another cheese and tomato sandwich, with bacon bits; I can't believe, lying like I do, for the sake of irony, that anyone would believe me.