Tale of a Cottontail

All creatures are beautiful, but the cottontail is especially so. It is so small and apparently fragile, but can outrun every dog in the country. They are tricky too, except when they get very frightened. Then they seem to lose their wits. Sort of like humans it seems. I met a cottontail a few days ago. It was on my 20-Minute-Mile walk.

The day was crisp and clear and the sun shone almost directly into my eyes. I hadn't taken my sun glasses along, so I was walking along the street, head down, thinking about how my back hurts, my feet ache, the asthma that's stealing my breath, and this little brown critter with long ears bounded across the street and disappeared into a weedy abandoned yard on my right. I still have it's image caught in mid jump--hind legs stretched out behind, front legs stretched forward as far as possible, its body about eight inches above the ground, ears partly erect, black fringes on its grayish brown sides, white tips on all four feet and along the belly and insides of the back legs as well as under the flag-like tail. It was there so quickly and disappearing just as quickly into the weed in two more bounds. But I knew from the look in its eye that it was more than simply aware of me. It seemed to know me, seemed to know more about me than I can express. Its eye was very very knowing, and the look of it is still there frozen in the stop-frame of my memory, the cottontail suspended mid-air, eye looking at me aware and knowing. Then the two bounds when it comes down and disappears into the weeds. The thing about that eye is that it left me aware of the cottontail.

I went on, smiling to myself, knowing that I had a friend to look forward to on my 20-Minute Mile. I had someone to commune with, to look forward to greeting each morning. And I was warmed to the core. I told my girlfriend about the cottontail when we met for coffee. I walk to a local eatery and reward myself with a cup of coffee and a fried confection called a crispito. It's a rolled flour tortilla with a cheesy filling and meat inside. Fresh from the deep fryer, they're delicious although a pale imitation of a Mexican invention called a flauta. I just mentioned to Linda that I'd seen a rabbit who was eking out a a life inside the town's limits despite the roaming dogs and cats. I admired it's spunk and it's freedom of choice. It could have been living in the wild, but had chosen proximity to humans for some reason and seemed very fit and healthy. I thought of it as a fringe critter, something I admire. I've lived on the fringe of society for many years now, by choice too, just as with the cottontail. And I was looking forward to meeting this independent spirit frequently in my future walks.

A couple of days ago, I was doing my 20-Minute-Mile meditation--thinking while walking--which makes it hard for me to walk. I noticed that a neighbor didn't have his rotweiler chained up in his backyard and that the wooden box meant for a shelter was gone. I hoped the dog hadn't been abandoned along a road somewhere in order to get rid of it. Or, worse, that it hadn't been shot. Both are common ways people choose to rid themselves of the responsibility when they reach the end of their patience with their canines and felines. I was walking along pondering why people do such things to animals and how things might change were we allowed to do the same to such people when we lose patience with them when I noticed a patch of fur in the middl of the lane on the other side of the street ahead. A sense of dread took me. I knew when I saw it. It was the cottontail. It had been hit by a car in a 25-mile-an-hour zone.

I don't think one can run over a rabbit at that speed. I think it's completely impossible. I let out a cry of grief and went to remove it from the street. I hurt. A lot. I put its body on the grass on the verge and went on about my walk. I could have put the cottontail into a nearby garbage can, but I couldn't bring myself to betray its diginity so vulgarly. Instead, I put it where it could return to Mother Nature and continued walking and crying for the soul that had touched my life so briefly, but which had affected me so profoundly. I wept, truly, and was still weeping a couple of blocks later when I looked up at the sky. It was the most beautiful cirulean blue I can remember. From the southeast white, high, thin clouds were drifting in. From the northeast, three contrails as white as the clouds trisected the sky before me in almost perfect symmetry, the leading one disappearing into the clouds as though leading the eye into them. The scene was so beautiful that my painful weeping almost instantly became weeping in wonderment and joy at the beauty I'd been blessed with, been allowed to see. And there came to me almost instantly the realization of how priviliged I was.

I'd been shown death and creation in a matter of moments. I'd seen beauty in both, felt pain and joy in a matter of minutes. I'd truly been favored. And I am thankful.