I hesitate to say this out loud, but I think Donna Coughlin has grown a bit fond of the whatever it is somebody put on her front lawn.

She will not actually admit to it, but Friday morning, when the Boulder sheriff knocked on her door, she told him she didn’t want it hauled away.

Donna Coughlin is the 80-year-old Boulder woman who made news last week when someone mysteriously and in the dead of night erected a 15-foot steel and concrete sculpture in the middle of the lawn at her 25th Street home.

It is a rather peculiar thing. It is mostly a slender, tapering, steel and concrete pillar shaded in blues and grays, from which a wild array of chains, mirrors, solar-powered lights and, I suppose, antennas protrude.

It was erected a week ago Friday. When Coughlin, who has lived in the house 53 years, saw it, she called the cops.

“I was so stunned,” she said, “I nearly fell through the floor.”

These days, she wishes she had never called police. It has led to all manner of trouble, she said.

One mix-up occurred Thursday when the city issued a decree that if the artist did not remove the sculpture by today, along with a similar one that mysteriously appeared last week at the Boulder History Museum on University Hill, it would have both hauled away.

The city thought Coughlin wanted hers hauled off. No, she said, leave it where it is. The sheriff’s visit was simply to confirm this.

She is convinced the perpetrator in all of it is artist Mark Guilbeau, a 1987 graduate of the University of Colorado fine arts program, who in April of that year one night left an enormous sculpted bug on her front lawn.

As with the current sculpture, he left a pair of handcrafted, brightly colored earrings in a box at the base of the bug.

“I never wear them,” Coughlin said as she pulled the nearly identical sets from a box. “I don’t want to lose them.”

She met Guilbeau when he came for the bug two weeks later. He invited her and a friend to an art showing at the university where she met his parents and learned he was from Louisiana.

It is how she knows the current sculpture is his: The newspapers that wrap the base of the sculpture are from Louisiana. That and the earrings.

She doesn’t know why she was picked again. Perhaps, she said, it is because her home sits on the heavily traveled corner of 25th and Edgewood Drive.

If Guilbeau is the culprit, she finds it rather charming that he cared to remember her 23 years later, and remembered to leave a present.

“This day and age,” she said, “there is so much bad stuff in the world. This isn’t any type of bad. It’s humor. It fits Boulder really well.”

She figures she’ll give the artist another week to retrieve the piece. After that, she said, she doesn’t know, but a neighbor has asked for it.

Every night and morning, she checks to see whether the sculpture is still there. She insists she will not be sad to see it go, though she will miss the colorful light show the solar-powered lights give off every night.

She would like to see Mark Guilbeau, who has been unreachable.

“I wouldn’t have dreamed something like this would show up in my yard 23 years later,” Coughlin said. “I would like to see Mark again, if only to tell him how much fun this has been.”

Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.