Gratitude Monday: return visit

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the brown bunny that has been wont to trot across my back yard of a morning or afternoon (one direction in the ack-emma, the reverse in the pip-emma). Last sighting was sometime in the Fall—actually, in the dark, early one morning on my way to work, at first a flash of iridescent eyes in my headlights, then a shadow flitting into the shrubs.

It’s been a very cold winter, and I was a little concerned. This bunny is not the Peter Cottontail version, all plump curves. No, this is the lean-and-hungry Cassius rabbit. Viz. this video of him enjoying a bit of apple from last year:

So you’ll understand that I’ve been worried that the little lagomorph might not have enough inner resources to make it through the waterpipe-freezingly cold months.

Imagine, then, my surprise and happiness yesterday afternoon, when I looked up from some writing and saw my brown buddy nosing about some apple peels I’d tossed out before it snowed on Saturday. (Listen—used coffee grounds, vegetable parings, peels—they’re part of my proto-attempt at amending soil that doesn’t appear to have been touched since the Pleistocene Era.)

He made it through the winter, and even looks a little curvy.

And that’s what I’m grateful for today.