So, why write a story for young readers about an Eastern cottontail rabbit rather than a tale about an animal that is far less common and may be more interesting? The reason is simple: I’ve had a love affair with rabbits ever since I saw the movie Bambi for the first time. Not only that, but twice in my life I’ve been given a pet rabbit as a gift of love. I was sixteen years old and head over heels about a boy named Mick. On my 16th birthday, he gave me a pearl ring (meaning we were going steady) and the following year, he gave me a live rabbit. We named the rabbit Thumper (of course) and set about making a him a cage out of wood and chicken wire. My parents, who’d been raised on dairy farms, would not, under any circumstances, allow a four-legged animal to live inside our house. So Thumper made his home in a cage in the garage in winter and under a dense fir, next to our brick house, in spring and summer. Unfortunately, Thumper’s life was abruptly taken by a neighbor’s wandering dog, who managed to rip the chicken wire off the cage with its sharp teeth.
Many years later in the early years of our marriage, my husband, Ralph, and his two children, Jonathan and Janine, brought home a pet lop-eared bunny as a gift for me. I was delighted! We named her Gretel, aka Gretel Honey-Bunny. Gretel moved into a cage in our family room alongside our blended family’s other pets: a cat, gerbils, a pair of dwarf hamsters, a white rat, and a cockatiel named Tootie.( Fair warning: a house rabbit that’s not litter-boxed trained is not a good idea.) Finally we moved Gretel to a cage outdoors, and this time, a city-living raccoon stalked the poor rabbit one summer night until she died of fright.
Trust me, I was devastated.
Fast forward twenty years: A new rabbit came into my life, this one a wild cottontail rabbit who found the brush pile in our fenced-in backyard to be a perfect dwelling. We’ve been enjoying her — or him? — and other random rabbits in our backyard, summer, spring, winter, and fall ever since. So this is what happened TODAY. Early this afternoon, when I took my dog Daisy for a walk, three neighbors were talking together on the street corner. They warned me about proceeding because, just moments before, they’d seen a large coyote dash across our front yard in pursuit of a fat rabbit. My heart sunk. Not much writing about rabbits got done. But, just a few hours ago at dusk, I looked out my window and into my backyard, and there was the rabbit, happily chomping on husks that had fallen to the ground from our bird feeder.
The moral of my story is this: My tale of Nettie Rabbit will end, no matter what, “happily ever after.”
Word count on Day #13 of National Novel Writing Month was less than 500 words. But I did get some laundry done!
(PS. The garden statutes pictured are in memory of Thumper and Gretel.)
#NaNoWriMo18