We used to have a female rabbit by the very original name of Cottontail. One day another "female" rabbit came to stay with us for a while.
Nicolás often carried cottontail in his backpack when he went to visit his friends and the bunny used to play with the dogs like crazy and have oodles of fun. She was very sociable and not shy in the very least.
Back from one of these outings, Nico left the bunny home and went immediately out to play again. Nobody check on the rabbit until a while after, when my wife enter his bedroom and found...
... the bottom drawer of a dresser that Cottontail used as quarters, was full of loose rabbit hair, somewhere below the fuzz there was six things that could be reasonably confused with used condoms, save for the fact that they were dragging themselves around the pen.
As time passed the unpalatable things turned into beautiful bunnies, and brought much happiness to our home. Everyone was in love with them: Troilo, the you were always guarding the room with the utmost protective airs, and Tito would fly there to check on them and spent hours perched atop the bars of the pen.
But with all the rejoicing also came the usual tug-of-war exercise that parents, more often than not, go trough in these circumstances. In the beginning we told Nico we wee going to give them away as soon as they were old enough and he understood and agreed (yeah, right) By the time Gabriela and Nico left to visit our family in Argentina, there was only one very white bunny left with us - baptized Pinky in another display of unmatched originality - and I was to take him to a pet store to be sold; which I did...
... two days after I was back at the door of the store, waiting for it to open, and with the charge to bring the rabbit back unto the fold of the family.
The problem was that the owner was not in town, she was away for the whole week, and the employee was not willing to give me back the rabbit without express authorization of the owner; nor she was amenable to keep the rabbit aside for us until she came back.
I ended up having to buy back my own home-born, home-raised, hand-fed bunny. But it was worth it; those rabbits were my son's best friends for a good many years. He even took Pinky away with him many years after, when he moved out with his girlfriend. Cottontail by then had already left us and Pinky has also died since.
They are buried together in an enormous planter that houses a Bay tree. They are not the only pets buried in pots and planters: after 30 years we still have the transient feeling of the exile, and we do not plant our beloved ones were we feel cannot take them with us.
Our garden is some kind of pet cemetery; but it is not a sad place: it is a place they used to love, so the memories are always good.
