Sign of the Bunny

Christmas eve night at around 12am .. so I guess technically Christmas day I lay awake in the hotel room. I could hear Noah breathing. He had woken me up so he could pee and gone back to sleep but I had no such luck. The weather had been in the 70's the day before but the temperature had been dropping. Nonetheless I put on my sandals and a coat and went outside to do some Kung Fu. It was cold. I should have worn some socks. I did some Mein Lay jum, some basics, and some Sup Ji. I was stil recovering from having drank way too much Port with my cousin either one or two nights ago. It was enough to make someone who was relatively tolerant of alcohol drunk and I have no tolerance whatsoever.
I finished up my little work out, all the while thinking of a conversation I was meaning to have with another cousin of mine, who was going through some tough times. I decided at the time that it would be a good idea to just write a note (and later decided that was equally as stupid) But at the time, thinking it was a good idea I walked on the path back to the hotel, and a Bunny came up to me and looked at me and then scurried away.


Later on Grace would say she used to be freaked out when I told her about Bunnies (though she said nothing in the past) until she started watching "Long Island Medium" and how on some episode the medium tells these ladies that there departed loved one is sending signs to them. Either a flower, or whatever. A bunny.
I asked Grace what the hell she was talking about and she said the the Bunnies were my mom. I thought she was crazy until she clarified that it wasn't that the bunnies were my mom, but that maybe my mother's spirit was allowing me to see bunnies as a sign that her spirit was close by.

I hadn't thought about that but I had thought that it was significant that I saw a bunny or hare at probably exactly midnight on Christmas which is significant in European  pagan cultures where bunnies are also significant. Then Grace shot my idea down and mentioned all the times I kept talking about bunnies. Bunnies that I would see and that nobody else would see. Not that those bunnies weren't physically there. Just that they would be gone by the time anyone else would come to look, or that nobody else would quite see them quickly enough whereas they were in my full view for a long period of time.

I would see them all the time when I first brought Noah home from the Hospital and also when we first brought Jonah home. And then, slowly, Grace learned about my connection with bunnies with my mother. First of all, at the Family Philadelphia House, My grandmother's house, we would all watch bunnies from the back living room window. It was something fun to do. But slowly as we got older, there were less and less bunnies and more and more squirrels. And it was something we all lamented about.
Secondly, my favorite toy was a stuffed Bunny and pretty much every Easter for some reason, my mother would buy a stuffed Bunny for me. They wouldn't necessarily become my favorite, I'm just saying the stuffed animals from her were usually Bunnies, plus we read a lot of bunny stories over and over, and even one easter bunny story involving a green egg resulted in a polished green egg of stone as a gift too. (I guess I had to toss all these out)

Last Christmas at the Nutcracker, a woman came up to me and Jonah and, as if she had been looking for us (she had obviously been looking for a small child) gave us a stuffed bunny as a gift. They had had a bunny as one of the characters for that particular production of the Nutcracker. In any case, all of these bunny stories, in which I had not seen any significance or relationship had been freaking Grace out. She had taken them as signs but not known whether they were good or bad... until she saw that Long Island Medium episode. Like the stiffed bunnies which I had thrown away when my mother died I had enjoyed the signs, but not seen anything significant. In other words I had sort of thrown them away. At first I had felt guilty for not being more reverential during these bunny signs. The last one I knew for sure was significant, but at first the Bunny had startled me as I thought it might be a rat, and then I kind of kept plowing forward instead of stopping to enjoy its presence. The more I thought about it, the more I saw what Grace saw. Well I guess that stuffed Nutcracker bunny can be Jonah's favorite toy. Indeed when we brought it out as an ornament he began snuggling it to go to sleep, surprisingly lovingly. Noah never did anything like that. He prefers cars and just doesn't hold things like that. Well I have to find that bunny now and treat it with a little more respect I think. Now where did I last see it?