Day or night, there are rarely fewer than four rabbits visible outside our house. I hop in my car and see them suspended in the headlights at the end of the yard near the playground, frozen in their foraging. “Watership Down” is what we call the old shed out back under which they have built their warren. Not that their lives are so perilous, except for the occasional red-tailed hawk sweeping through. They thrive in this urban oasis, with its pond and abundant greenery, delicate herbs and flowers, and tasty tulip bulbs, growing ever more rare.
We see them less in winter, when their trails cut freewheeling arcs across the snow.
Pushing aside pockets of dead grass in the lawn come springtime, we find fluffles of newborns tucked away. When they are very small, some of these adorable “dumb bunnies” are too new to this world to be afraid of humans. Soon enough, though, they will be darting for cover into the bushes around the house.
Once they have reached maturity, experience has taught them they don’t have to be much concerned when we appear. The big ones will look up, furiously munching a mouthful of grass, and then get right back to it.
When a freshly planted patch of perennials has been found nubbed down to the ground again, we make jokes about hasenpfeffer and lapin à la moutarde, but we have never waged an active campaign against the rascally rabbits. The garden would feel lifeless without them. We worry when we see them crossing the busy street alongside the house, and I once rescued a little one who made it only as far as the curb and was found huddled against it, trembling, as cars whooshed by.
They are part of our peaceable kingdom, which also harbors fish, frogs, groundhogs, squirrels, chipmunks, mice, bats, nesting hummingbirds, mourning doves, and many other chattery avian types, as well as such passersby as feral cats, raccoons, possums, blue herons, hawks, owls, and pollinators. Who knew so much life could flourish on one city lot, amid so much concrete?
The grade-school playground just beyond our yard has its own ecosystem and boisterous population. When I was a child, I attended this school for a few years, before moving away to live all over the country and, eventually, abroad. I don’t remember being aware of the house I now live in when my schoolyard dramas played out next door, but I certainly passed in its shadow. It’s a Victorian structure with gables and rooftop crenellations that we sometimes hear the kids call “haunted.”
The house I do remember walking past on my way to and from school is just down the block. There was a boat parked in the high grass behind it, and there were always bunnies milling about. I would edge silently along the property, wanting desperately to catch and hold one—and under the boat they would disappear! Always just out of reach, they remained a magical highlight of my days. Rabbits were the wonderous creatures of storybooks: Alice’s anxious friend, the trickster Br'er, gentle Peter, and the velveteen one that love made real.
When I moved onto this block, over three decades later, that house still had a boat marooned in an unkempt yard full of rabbits. They were doubtless cousins of the colony living under our shed. And again, who knows—How long are a warren’s tunnels? I imagine them extending out under our grass all the way to the neighbor’s in one giant network, like the wormhole transporting me across time back to this place, where children’s voices ring from the playground and rabbits proliferate in the yard.
Which brings us to T. S. Eliot and his inevitable lines: “And the end of all our exploring /
Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”
I often feel as if I stepped off that playground and through the Looking Glass, to arrive, after so much living, only moments later in the same spot—ready to call it home.
Music: "White Rabbit" by George Benson
