Frequently Asked Questions

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After, "How do you get there? the most frequently asked questions around Edgewood Place are:

"What is that little white bear about?" "Where did it come from?" "How did it end up here?"and"Aren't you afraid to let it wander around outside like that?"

There are many answers to each of those questions, but the basic story as her mother tells it, is that Noella (or Nowella, as she spells it) is the daughter of a Black Bear and a White Man.

Nowella's mother is a "Black Bear" who is, (as is common in the species) more brown than black and even a little white herself, due to sun-fading and a nimbus ice-white guard- hairs on muzzle and back.

Sometimes Nowella believes Mother Bear's versions of things, and sometimes not.

Believe us, she has considered and agresively persued the possibility that her father was a polar bear , which Nowella , except in size, more closely resembles than she does a man or her own mother. Little Nowella has traveled north and even south to look for the possibility of him, though she probably never got as far as the geographical Artic or Antartic. Nowella is none the less a very well traveled bipolar bear with advanced survival and adaptation skills. She is a remarkable dog whisperer for one thing, which begins to get into the question as to how we came by her, or how she came by here: one beginning of a story with many long beginnings, a story which will presumably have one short end, but has had very long, early middle period.

It seems to Nowela that for a hundred (that would be ten or twenty bear years] but still unlikely, she wandered about as lonely as a cloud across the moon She could easily have passed by you unnoticed, a white bear in a bare landscape.

Nowella actually has a full-blooded black bear half brother and half sister, who, the last she knew, were still with her mother somewhere up North in the Bonaparte Cave State Forest. Huckleberry and Blueberry are their names, but she was hardly ever with them except at Christmas. always wandering and seeking.

And the wandering, seeking life is a hard one, spent mostly seeking food and shelter. For a drink of water, she was lucky if she didn't have to eat snow.

When you are in far places, you learn to eat what others eat.

When you are alone with no one to guide you, you just have to follow your nose.

You have to settle for shelter others have abandoned

Sometimes out there Nowella realized that endlessly seeking her father, or herself, the facts, or whatever it was at the time, she only suceeded in her loosing herself, like the white bear in the snow she was. So there you are: the tragedy, the comedy, and the Moral.

Mostly though, Nowella thinks her wandering and seeking years have been worth all the hardship and failure, just for that High Lonesome Feeling she sometimes gets when she deeply becomes a place, as she does Edgewood Place, or this: the mouth of a little Buttermilk Creek on Cayuga Inlet. An hour before you see her still sitting here, a sun-blackened and bloodied rainbow trout as long as Nowella - splurged down the tiny fall into the pool.

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