From a Hat

Or, A Rabbit Diary 🐇

Each spring, I’ve come to look forward to the rabbits that appear in the garden behind the bookstore where I work. I’ll be in the back office, collecting books or supplies to restock, and I’ll glance out the window to find an adult chewing clover or a baby staring straight back at me. Squirrels are common, a dime a dozen, but a rabbit sighting always seems like a sign, or something. Never mind what seeing one, or two, means. For me, the magic is in noticing, the pause within a workday to connect with an animal who won’t ever punch a time clock or ask someone if they would like a receipt, a creature whose existence is threaded on a delicate instinctual chain.

The bookstore rabbits nestle their young in the gardens. They gather hair and debris into safe havens among the hellebores and creeping myrtle. They fold themselves impossibly small and wedge between pavestones stacked into a garden wall. On a nice day when we had the shop door open last year, a baby rabbit hopped into the store, made right for the staff picks. Someone found a gentle way to usher this soul back into the garden.

This March, rabbits filled my neighborhood. Early mornings, out with my dog for her first walk of the day, I’d stare down driveways and see their slippered silhouettes beside the tires of parked cars. Or I’d look out the kitchen window to see one munching breakfast in a neighbor’s yard. A rabbit standing in the middle of the sidewalk. A rabbit paused in the middle of the road. A rabbit darting into a neighbor’s forsythia. I snap faraway photos blurred from zooming in. I keep a safe distance, try not to startle them. Sometimes my dog seems uncomfortable when she notices one, even though she’s the larger animal. Still, we both quietly agree, we’re sharing meaningful company on the sidewalks and in the grass.

I lament the chewed Rudbeckia heads somewhat less than I used to. They’re flowers; they’ll return. Anything I plant isn’t mine anyhow. The hours poured into the dirt, the unruly borders, the overwhelming miniature succulent nook where first I noticed one California bluebell and then, several days later, a few more. They multiplied, “like rabbits” one could say, though not necessarily to such abundant extents. The blue frills like scarves scrambling up to swallow the sun.

This isn’t exclusively magic or “hard work,” it’s collaboration. And in these gentle sightings and growths, I choose to believe it’s both coincidence and not because half of what’s happening here is paying attention in the first place to notice.

The noticing wouldn’t feel quite the same if these were the enormous rabbits in Night of the Lepus (1972), a science fiction film about killer rabbits terrorizing a small Arizona town. These rabbits take over homes and convenience stores, they burrow into gold mines. It’s wonderful, weird fun, the kind of thing you might expect to watch on Mystery Science Theater 3000, which I believe referenced the film in commentary during other films, but never dove in with a full episode on this cult classic.

Perhaps it’s hubris to project that these neighborhood has anything to do with me or my life. Still, I’ve had times when I’ve been driving around and felt quite alone and noticed a deer standing beside the road. We exchange “Howdy” gazes and gracefully continue along. These encounters find me more firmly devoted to carrying softness and vulnerability, a deep sensitivity to my surroundings but also my inseparability from them, appreciation for the interconnected-everything. Being this open can feel like a gentle ambush; emotions can seem negotiable in careless hands, kindness may be mistaken for stupidity. And yet, the possibility remains to be pleasantly surprised. A white puff of tail leaping ahead, down the sidewalk, surprises me regardless of how many I’ve seen on these walks. The California bluebells winking up from the dirt. The prickly pears I believed were surely goners when I checked them in the winter to find the nopales shriveled, are now bent with the weight of new paddles.

Just this morning, I counted four rabbits. This morning could have been any morning. The count could have been two or one, though I have clocked six. Before the traffic picks up. Before I speak to anyone. Before the day becomes a swirl of lists and tasks and restlessness. In the early days of noticing the rabbits, staring down dark driveways, I longed for stability. I wanted to put everything back into place before I even knew what I wanted to keep or what I would find if I looked long enough.

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