Most mornings for the last few weeks, when I have ventured out into the summer heat to water the herb garden and flowers growing in pots outside the kitchen door on the back deck, I have found bones.

They are bleached white in the sun, always carefully arranged. At first we found them laid out neatly on the stairs to the lower level of the deck, one on each stair next to the left railing. Lately, though, they have been displayed on the posts that punctuate the deck fencing, like sculptures on pedestals.

The bones appear mysteriously overnight. We marvel at them, at their whiteness and smoothness, at their interesting and sometimes alarming shapes. Then we quickly remove them, tossing them into the trash or into the woods. But they keep reappearing. Sometimes a rib, a fractured jawbone of a hapless opossum, slender and stocky bones.

The creator of these ossified artworks is a mystery, although we suspect a raccoon, the only creature we�ve witnessed in our yard that is both dextrous enough to create the arrangements and nimble enough to place bones on the deck posts. The raccoons love our deck. They lurk under it in the dusk, lumbering out occasionally to torment our housebound cats or to wander down to the creek to wash and wash and wash their paws. I love that the German word for raccoon is �Waschb�r� � literally �Wash Bear.�

Does our raccoon have artistic talent? Archeological pretensions? Obsessive Compulsive Disorder? The arrangements seem so deliberate, even elegant. They make me look at the objects in a new way. It�s Georgia O�Keefe in reverse. In this sense they meet characteristics of art. They methods of display even mimic artistic presentation. But if art is the product of a civilized culture, how can it be art? Is it all in my head? Is it the ultimate �outsider art?�

How much of art is the viewer�s own creation?

The bones have been haunting me this week. I see them in my dreams, where I attempt to reassemble them, to determine their source through which I hope to glean the identity of the one who placed them there. But mostly I am amazed that in changing the location of a small object, it is transformed into something totally new.

[Second entry today, possibly in lieu of an entry tomorrow when I plan to be hiding out in some archive or other. Unless this heat sucks the life out of me, in which case I will be cowering in my ice-cold dungeon of an office and praying for snow.]

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