March 27, 2019
Dear Emily,
I
should have let the rabbit go free.
I’ve been thinking about that rabbit a lot here lately.
When
I was in the 4th Grade, I found a baby rabbit whose nest had been
turned up in a newly cut hayfield just west of the house. Her mother must have run away, and being
a farm girl, I knew that after I handled the little baby, the mother wouldn’t
want her anymore. She was so tiny;
she easily nestled in the palm of my hand, so I took her to the house and
immediately found a medicine dropper to feed her warm milk. She drank the milk quickly and
easily. I named her “Hoppy”
(really original don’t you think) and found an old shoebox for her to live
in. I lined it with new grass so
it would seem more like her home in the hayfield. She seemed to imprint with me. She would crawl up in my hand and go to sleep just like a
baby kitten. I took her to school
the next day, and of course, she was a hit. I didn’t take her back to school, but the next day I
couldn’t wait to get home to see her.
I took her out in the yard to play in the grass in her natural habitat.
She grew fast. Pretty soon she was too big for the shoebox so I got a large
cardboard box and used an old towel for bedding. Picking enough grass to line the larger box was too much
trouble. Now when I took her
outside, she hopped away pretty fast, and I had to be careful not to let her
get away. I think I even tied a
string of yarn around her neck to keep her close by. My mother began to caution me about the wisdom of keeping a
wild rabbit as a pet. “She’s not
meant to be a pet. You need to let
her go.” But I loved that little
rabbit and by the time I had had her two weeks, I couldn’t bear to think about
letting her go back to the woods where I was sure she wouldn’t survive the
hawks or the dogs or whatever eats little bunny rabbits. So I kept her, and she kept growing.
Eventually, she outgrew the new box, so I got a bigger box. Then a bigger
box. But she was now full grown
and much too large for any box.
Growing
up in an old house with unused rooms provides a freedom that people who live in
nicer houses don’t have. For some
reason, my parents didn’t force me to set Hoppy free; instead, they allowed
me to use a small room upstairs as her living quarters. She was confined to that small room all
day everyday because she was much too big and wild for me to take outside. I fed and watered her of course, but
after she bit me one day, I didn’t attempt to pet her anymore. We had become strangers. I had kept her too long, and I knew it, but I still couldn’t
let her go.
Finally,
one afternoon when I went upstairs to feed her, I found that she had died. I clearly remember that I cried and
cried bitter tears, but I know now
my tears were not tears of sadness; they were tears of guilt. Sometimes you can selfishly love something too
much and because you love it so much, you hold on to it too long. You can kill the very thing that you
love in the name of loving it.
“To
everything there is a season….” I
should have let the rabbit go free.
Love, BB
