Rabbits are born and live out their stories in the same patch their entire lives. The lineage of the fat rabbit I see in the spring may have begun sixty-seven generations back, when the park was first established. After a month or so of observing her in April, she allows me the honor of seeing her two small cottontails, the next generation. They’re never in sight for long before they scurry away to the low brush.
My dog Elsa has old eyes. They may catch the bunnies on the run. Yet, her little legs tire as soon as the furries stop moving. Neither can her thinning olfactory glands sniff out their burrows. I’m pretty sure the rabbits are on to her as they don’t go far. All to say, the wildlife in the little city park seems safe.
Except it isn’t.
On a chilly November morning, I approached the far side of the park with Elsa. I wondered if the rabbits had burrowed in for the winter. I glanced over to the street side of the park to see gardeners unloading a backhoe from their truck. They wasted no time starting that thing up and ramming through the waist-high boxwood hedge to the middle of the garden, ripping out vegetation where the rabbits live.
“Hey! Stop!”
With Elsa at my heels, I barged through the boxwood on my side of the park, flailing my arms. I was about to jump in front of the moving machinery. The driver stopped. His companion came to me.
“What about the bunnies?” I shouted.
“No English!” he shrugged.
“The rabbits! The rabbits! They live there!”
He laughed at me and signaled to the backhoe driver to keep going. They were having a ball.
That was it. I had no choice in the matter. The feral gardeners yanked all the underbrush, faded lilies and droopy irises. They removed the clumpy hostas that cover wild animals and the prairie asters that catch goldfinches and warblers. The backhoe dug holes for six newly planted baby trees.
December is here now. Arborists removed honey locusts and hackberries that no one realized were distressed. The winter trellis of bare branches is spare. Above and below the wide open space leaves no comfort. No place to hide. The left-behind soft brown and grey prairie grass, goldenrod and hydrangea are fallow and forlorn.
But all will be lovely in the spring. And the ancestral rabbits will return.
Whenever one of my dogs died I experienced profound grief that turned to sadness, for a time. A season of sadness. These days, sadness lasts longer. It’s not because my dog died but because so much is out of my control, like the displaced rabbits. I pray not for the sadness to leave me, but to manage to live with it. I have a sense many seasons of sadness are afoot. All may not be lovely this spring.
I wish I had saved those bunnies.
evening garbage, that doubting God strengthens faith. And it did. Until I started doing my own version of God. I built a periodic table of spiritual elements with blocks of God-info such as heaven and hell don’t exist and Jesus’ Resurrection is simply a symbol of renewed life. Trouble is, I silently scorned those who didn’t believe as I did. When I first met my co-workers I held a colonizing view of their beliefs. Over time my religious formulas fell in the trash heap. As slave descendants, they daily transformed their passed-down spiritual trauma into “I believe.”
Regan Burke 