He’s so small he can’t open his eyes, but when I pick him up to hold him, knowing all googled research says this isn’t best for him, he nuzzles into my palm looking for milk.
He’ll die in mere hours but I want to believe my warm palm will make a difference.
I bring out a seven year old’s bamboo sock, hoping to shield his tiny body from the cold earth and rough red mulch. My mother-in-law pulls into the driveway to find me late for a meeting, holding him and a sock in my palm, a shallow soy sauce bowl full of water and hope, set beside us while I wept. It’s raining out, and I place both him and the sock farther inside the flower bush for refuge.
He’ll die in mere hours but I want to believe my warm palm will make a difference.
The kids come home from school, damp from walking around the pond in the rain without an umbrella, inquisitive about the pile of cotton/fleece/bamboo blend socks now piled under the flower bush with a shallow soy sauce bowl full of water and hope nearby.
I explain, that the cat we continue to care for who continues to kill things, may have hurt a baby bunny, so small he can’t open his eyes, might be dying under the flower bush. But I held him in my palm with hope the size of a soy sauce bowl and with tears in my eyes and the fresh feeling of baby bunny nuzzle looking for mothers milk on the flesh of my thumb, who might feel as if the fleece blend socks he’s wrapped in is his mother hugging him and so he might be okay after all.
My daughter weeps and runs inside to grab an umbrella to place above the bush, to keep him from the pouring rain. She walked home from school, around the pond, wearing a fleece sweatshirt and no umbrella, damp and drenched and happy. She’s now damp and drenched and full of despair.
He’ll die in mere hours but I want to believe the warm palm and the soy sauce bowl of hope and the fleece blend socks and the umbrella over the flower bush will make a difference.
I’ll go to a meeting, dreaming up quick dreams of clouds and florescent lights and talking of breath and death and armadillos, distracted at the fact that there’s a dead bunny waiting to be buried when I get home.
I’ll get home to race inside the house to get the soccer shoes and soccer bag and shoes on to get to practice while two kids and I run outside to beat the rain and peek under the flower bush to see the bunny is gone. Hope the size of soy sauce bowls and seven year old eye sockets beam that he’s made it. He’s finally safe. “Can you google if a Mother Bunny knows how to find a dying baby in the rain?” Yes, I say, full of hope. And I’ll turn back toward the abandoned fleece blend socks with a small smile on my face knowing my warm palm made the difference when I glance six inches to the south to see there’s a baby bunny waiting to be buried.
At least 18 children are dead after a shooting at a Texas elementary school today. There are no socks, no soy sauce bowls full of hope, only tweets of thoughts and prayers but no action because guns outweigh baby bodies and baby bunnies who are waiting to be buried.
