Bunny Kingdom

My gruff husband and our gruff neighbor, a 50-year old guy we have known since he was twelve and setting up a skateboard ramp on the sidewalk, and with whom we just ended a three-year silence because he kept calling the Forestry Department about our beautiful, if somewhat hollow, maple tree, just had a conversation about a wild rabbit named Milton who seems to be wintering under the gruff neighbor’s porch.

The gruff neighbor says that whatever he doesn’t put in his soup or his smoothie gets tossed under the porch for Milton. Part of me rankles. Milton is going to like the neighbor better than us, never mind that there is now a good three feet of hard snow keeping Milton from his sit spot next to our house. Then, I say sternly to my gruff husband, “He’s going to get rats,” a danger I know about firsthand. That is a long story from a while ago but true. I found a dead rat in our yard and, from that, many things unfolded.

This is the same gruff neighbor whose step-daughter still climbs a ladder to get into her second story bedroom so as to avoid any possible COVID exposure to his mother, a woman we knew better at one time than we do now because she is homebound. She lives next door but we’ve not seen hide nor hair of her for months. Her frailty, when we witnessed it a year or so ago, was, if not heart-stopping, conversation-stopping, it being so hard to believe that she was the same person we knew when she yelled at her son for making the skateboard ramp too high.

Outside, the other neighbor has returned from wherever he’s been during this long snowstorm and is snow-blowing his driveway. Sometimes, well, often, he clears the sidewalk in front of our house. We’ve hired a person to do this for us now but when the neighbor does it, we are still grateful. People don’t have to be kind – to other people or rabbits – so it’s nice to recognize when they are. If this time has taught us anything, it might be that.

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Photo credit: Photo by Macau Photo Agency on Unsplash