Midnight Marauders

The other night I dreamt of bears. Sometimes when I dream it is like watching a documentary. Usually dreams like this involve animals. I'm not even in the dream; it is something I'm watching. A narrator's voice will guide me through what I am seeing. In this case it was a bear. It looked like a grizzly I guess, sort of a golden color. The narrator was rattling off details about the bear that I don't really remember. It's always a generic man's voice, by the way.

That's when I actually woke up to the sound of Winnie growling. Evie's hearing must not be as sharp as Winnie's because Winnie is always the first to wake up. Her ears are three years younger than Evie's.

Winnie was staring intently through the blinds covering the sliding glass doors in my bedroom into the lanai. Peeking through the slats I saw two HUGE raccoons on the lanai. Half-asleep and half-doped on NyQuil (fighting a cold) I couldn't believe the size of them. I looked at the clock to see that it was 4:00 am.

My first reaction was to share this sighting with someone. I ran into Sadie's room to tell her that the biggest raccoons I'd ever seen were out on the lanai and did she want to see. She told me to go back to sleep.

All I had to do was turn on the porch light to send them scampering away. They swiftly fit themselves under the baby screen that surrounds the pool and disappeared. I was so freaked out by this occurrence that it took at least an hour to fall back to sleep.

The bandits were after the dog dishes full of food that I had so stupidly left out on the lanai. I fell asleep before remembering to bring them in for the night. The raccoons must have thought they hit the jackpot with these perfectly uniform crunchy morsels, formulated for sensitive stomachs I might add.

In bed I kept thinking about how they could have gotten in. I hadn't seen a torn screen in the lanai. I envisioned one standing on his partner's shoulders, manipulating the latch on the screen door. I couldn't make any sense out of it and fell asleep for a few hours to dream strange dreams with lots of people and dialogue, but nothing worth remembering.

That morning upon brief investigation I noticed that one of the screen was, in fact, ripped. So it's going to cost me some money and it was stupid to leave the dog food out, and I should have known better. However, it was almost worth it to see gigantic raccoons that could magically make themselves so small as to fit under a net that's almost flush with porch floor. It was a pretty interesting brush with nature that I don't necessarily want to repeat.