An instant

Monday, the rabbits were everywhere.

While I worked at my desk, Roo sat in the window and lashed his tail at the rabbit that’s often in the front yard in the morning, and then Roo hunkered closer, pressing to the screen, jaw vibrating in silent chat. The rabbit wasn’t simply cherry-picking the dandelion stalks from the yard, but rather carrying dried grasses into the astilbe1 beside the front stoop.

Nest.

For two minutes, I allowed myself to imagine the adorableness of egg-sized new buns bopping about the yard, right where I (and my indoor cats) could watch them all the time.

Then I remembered the rabbit who, three years ago, built a nest beneath the nearby hose reel so stealthily we didn’t notice her doing it. The carnage when the neighbor’s roving outdoor cat found them.

An astilbe would make a very beautiful home, but its soft stalks and low leaves would not make a protected one at all. So Bill removed the existing nest-bits and put a stone over the place where she’d started to dig. It appears to have been an effective deterrent, at least at time of writing.

***

When the sun had risen enough to warm up the driveway, I carried my breakfast outside2. As I was scraping up the last bites of strawberry-rhubarb crumble, a rabbit burst from the underbrush at the lower end of the yard, pursued by a red fox. The rabbit safely made it to the ditch full of black raspberry canes between our house and the neighbor’s, and the fox turned back, rather than expend effort in a game it couldn’t win. It trotted easily back the way it came, tongue lolling but body language spritely enough. That instant: the closest I have ever been to a wild red fox. For all their numbers here, they’ve remained smart and shy, loping across the pasture in the distance, maybe taking a little shortcut through the yard, but never when we’re outside. The tip of its tail disappeared beneath one of the banks of honeysuckle and I stood, marveling for a moment.

A heartbeat later, another rabbit broke from the brush, toward me, and the same fox tore after. This time, the chase took them past the fallow raised beds and into the tree-lined fence row between our house and the fields that house more distant neighbors’ mouthy little donkeys and the big brown gelding who has to be coaxed in at night. The rabbit immediately disappeared; I watched the fox slow again and trot along, a copper flicker between the green and shadow.

Two lucky rabbits. One pragmatic fox.

In the evening, another rabbit—or perhaps one of the same—lay lounging on the concrete lip around the Bilco doors to the basement, as though there were no foxes at all in this world.

What I’m making:

Labor of love, for sure. The last 10 inches of this, even though the rows get shorter and shorter as one decreases, felt like they took forever. That said, this is a blissfully easy pattern3 that will give you a perfectly square blanket at the end of it. Peak “my attention is elsewhere” knitting. Again, great way to use up bits of things if you want some stripes, but it also looks nice if you go with a single color. This is made with three strands of wool in various colors held together. It’s going to be a perfect stadium blanket: squishy and insulating.

What I’m reading: The Thicket by Kasey JuedsThis is a collection I feel especially glad to sit with, or rather rest inside of, given the way it recreates spaces on the page.

These are poems of precise details rich with implication. From “The Tool Shed”:

I am especially enamored of the natural details here—poem after poem crisp and true in its evocation of place and time.

What I’m writing—or rather, what I’ve written: From Bestiary, a chapbook project dreamed into being as part of a book-making independent study by Isaac K. Fox, one of my lake monster sonnets. The kernel of this piece, and the second sonnet, and a short story I’m grinding along on, comes from one of Nick White’s Kenyon Review Writers Workshop prompts.

And my monster, sweet left-handed creation:

Thank you for reading Loomings. This post is public so feel free to share it.