My daughter’s birthday is a week before Christmas, which she loves.
“I get twice as many presents!” She often reminds her brother, who has to wait until June to get a second wave of gifts. For the person in charge of purchasing these two close-together rounds of gifts (which is me), it’s a little less fun.
We were discussing what she might like to receive this year when I remembered that she’d been asking for a pet of her own for a while. Now, we already have two house dogs, two more ranch dogs, two house cats, two hermit crabs (“That belong to brother!” she reminded me), two small goats, a coop full of chickens, a barn full of sheep and a pasture full of cows and horses. But I remember being her age, and desperately yearning for an animal to care for and spend time with that was MINE.
Her first choice was a Galapagos Tortoise, an animal on which she’d done a project at the beginning of the school year. Big, very slow and presumably quite docile, a giant tortoise probably would make a good pet except for the fact he or she would likely outlive us all, and also keeping them as pets is illegal. I suggested we Google “good pets for kids.”
Longtime readers will remember the little red barn behind our new house came with a bunny and his hutch left by the previous owners, and that I originally thought his care would be a good chore for kids. But, due to a revolving door of extenuating circumstances, he became another chore for me instead.
Well, there on the Googled list, between “crested gecko” and “guinea pig” was “rabbit,” and even though she’d mostly ignored him for a year, my daughter said firmly, “If I can’t have a giant tortoise, I want the bunny to come inside and live in my room.”
I wasn’t so sure, but we did some research, and I had to admit, in the abstract, that a house bunny sounded like a perfect pet for her. However, our bunny had been a barn bunny his whole life. If there was food involved, he would let me pet him but otherwise shrugged away from my touch. And when I’d lift him out to clean his hutch, he would get very stressed — he did NOT like being picked up and moved around.
All of which tracked — in my experience, small prey animals do not like big changes, even good ones. Still, I agreed we could give it a trial run. We’d bring him inside in his travel cage for a short visit, and if he didn’t seem too panicked we’d make the visits longer.
I’ll cut to the chase here, and tell you it’s five days later, and Lil’ Timmy (as he has since been named) never did go back outside. We’ve constructed a makeshift pen, and Roo has written and posted a letter to Santa with her and Lil’ Timmy’s wish list which includes an indoor hutch and accessories.
They’ve also taken most of their meals together in her room, and we think she must have some secret hypnotic powers, because when she starts petting him, his body completely relaxes into stillness, and when she stops, he hops over to find out why. It’s like they’ve been friends forever.
I was recently complaining that one of the hardest things about middle age is realizing life is a lot more predictable than your younger self ever realized. The proposal that sounded too good to be true was. The quick fix took forever. It gets harder to dwell in possibility when you accept a human life is short and most things worth doing take a long time.
But that just makes it all the more sweet when life surprises you. When a semi-feral barn bunny and a little girl who’s been living a couple of dozen yards from each other discover they are soul mates. When you find out what you wanted most was what you already had.
