Week 11 entry...
Almost everyone has tales of the coincidences that arise from "If I'd only left a few minutes earlier" or "If I'd taken the bus instead of my bike" and so on -- moments that wouldn't have happened with a different seemingly-inconsequential decision. For my own part, a simple decision of where to stay for the night led to hearing one of the most memorable stories I've ever heard.
My husband and I were on a vacation several years ago, heading out to Yellowstone National Park and the surrounding area for a couple weeks. At one point, we found ourselves at a local motel in Sherdian, WY; we'd considered pushing on a little further, but decided there was really no reason to drive into the late evening hours. We were on vacation, after all! We didn't need to push it. So, we grabbed a quick dinner at the nearby cafe, got a decent night's sleep, and then woke early to start our drive the next day.
It was too early for the hotel's donuts and juice, sadly, so I went down to check out at the front desk while my husband took our two larger bags straight to the truck. I joined him in a minute, handing him my laptop bag that I'd been carrying. As he rummaged around in the back, shifting things here and there (we were camping part of the time, so we had a tent and supplies for that as well), I crossed the parking lot to the back edge, which butted up against a large field. (Well, most of Wyoming could be classified as a 'large field', but that is neither here nor there.)
I spotted a rabbit or two hopping about. As this was nothing at all unusual for the West, I didn't think anything of it.
Until I saw a black rabbit.
Wow, I thought. That's really unusual to see out in the wild. Not absolutely unheard of, but pretty rare. Cool!
Within a few moments, a pure white one went hopping by, calm as could be. Then, a multicolored one -- not just shades of gray and brown, but like a calico cat would look. My eyebrows were reaching skyward as I cocked my head to the side. Wondering if I'd suddenly been transported to Mr. Bun's Neighborhood, I started scanning the field with an air of 'What the hell...'
Rabbits of all colors and sizes are pretty much everywhere when I looked closely, and I even see a few with the longer hair you would never see on a rabbit out in the wild.
"Hey, what are you looking at?" my husband asks as he comes up behind me. I sort of just mutely wave my hand out at the field. I knew it wouldn't take him long to...
"What the hell?"
...see what I was pointing at. I had started to count the animals hopping around out there, trying to even get a rough estimate of what we were seeing, when a voice called out to us, amusement clearly audible in the words.
"You wondering about the rabbits?"
We turned to find one of the hotel's cleaning crew arriving for their morning's work; she was rolling a cleaning cart out of a storage closet/room of some kind.
"Yeah," I said as we ambled back over to her, still sort of half-turning to look at the field as we walked. "They can't possibly be the local wild rabbit population -- some of them look like show rabbits or whatever. And there's just so *many*!"
"They're sort of both," she said as she started loading her cart with supplies and such. "That farm across the way there, the one with the shed with the red roof? An old farmer used to raise rabbits there for a number of things -- meat, fur, and a few for show. Had a niece or something, I forget, who liked to show rabbits in the fairs and so on.
"He'd raised a lot of animals through the years, but towards the end, there was just the rabbits. They were kind of like his kids -- he really cared about them, took really good care of them, would ramble on about them at the drop of a hat and so on. Then one day, several years ago now, he just up and died; heart attack, I think it was, though he'd been diagnosed recently with cancer too.
"Well, his wife just had no idea what to do with all these rabbits. She tried for a little bit to keep up with it, but just wasn't up to it herself, really, with her own health problems and so on. So, a few weeks after he died, she just opened up the cages and barn doors and let 'em wander away. All of them, every last one."
The woman finished loading her rack of cleaning sprays and extra garbage bags onto her cart. She turned to look out over the field.
"And, well, let's just say -- people don't say that something 'breeds like rabbits' for nothing, if you know what I mean."
Looking back the field and its huge residency of mobile fluff balls, we could only start to roar with laughter in agreement.
This is my entry for the eleventh week of Season 8 of therealljidol. This week was an 'open topic', which means no specific prompt was given. As always, thanks for reading.