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One beautiful Sunday morning my
mother brought home two pink-eyed baby white rabbits, Easter
presents for my sister and I. They were the perfect. We
delightfully held them, hugged them, loved them. It was my
dad, though, that decided to pick up the idea and run with it.
First he bought a few rabbits old enough to breed, and then he
bought a few more. He began selling the meat to a local grocery
store (have you ever seen rabbit meat for sale in a grocery
store?) It wasn't long before mom's simple Easter present had
exploded into 200 pairs of long furry ears, most of them housed
in the double decker row of pens we built on the extra wooded
lot that we had next to our house. In the morning before school
it was my job to feed them. That meant that in the winter time I
had to break the ice out of all of their water dishes. Some days
it was so cold that the water had frozen all the way through so
I would have to bring the cans into the garage and let them thaw
until the edges melted and the ice would fall out. In the
meantime if I was running late I had to watch for the school
bus. Our rabbit pens were on top of the hill that our house sat
on, and on the opposite hill there was only one curve where the
road was visible. If I saw the big yellow bus coming around that
curve I had to sprint the 220 yards down our community driveway.
Oh, I wasn't going to out sprint the bus which only had to go about the
same distance I did, but the driver knew how many kids
he expected to pick up at our stop and most of the time he could
see me running down the hill and would wait for me. I have to
chuckle, though, no wonder I did so well on the track team when
I got to high school. |
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