Beyond the horse barn cotton fields conceal cotton tails, jack rabbits, and a colony of lop-eared bunnies turned feral.
I once released a rabbit into a park near the house I lived in while still married. I told my daughter that he’d found a new home, this Jersey Wooly who wound up with the ridiculous name of Hey Diddle Diddle. I told myself the hole he gnawed in the closet drywall and his pea-sized trails of droppings drove me to do it.
My daughter no longer cared about the rabbit, and yet she cried for days after finding the habitat empty.
I told myself no hawk could scoop up a rabbit clocking in at twelve pounds. Still, for many nights afterwards I couldn’t sleep. Days I took to scouring the park’s shrubbery, tree hollows, its dips in terrain. I never found him.
All of this happened more than a decade ago. We sold the house five years later, just before the divorce.
The feral lop-eared rabbits were once part of the school district’s 4H Program. The facility—a compound of fenced pens and cages—is just down the road from the horse barn. Rabbits aren’t renowned for their intelligence. Unlike pigs. Smaller than a cow and far more intelligent than sheep or goats, pigs are among the most popular 4H projects, trotting after their elementary school guardians with a faithfulness rivaling that of the most devoted dog. I can’t imagine raising and tending to an animal daily, knowing it’s ultimately destined for slaughter. But I’m a city-born-transplant from up north. The kids out here are far less sentimental.
Every once in a while my daughter still brings up Hey Diddle Diddle. Every once in a while, and sometimes more often than that, we make decisions with poor outcomes. In medieval times, the cat and the fiddle figured prominently on the signage of inns. But where did the laughing dog come from? and whatever prompted the cow to jump over the moon? As if cows could jump. Or pigs fly for that matter.
Maybe Hey Diddle Diddle found another family. Or maybe the rabbit, like many of us, just didn’t want to be found.
