Part 1
"Raining again", she thought aloud, even though there was no one else in the room to hear her observation.
With a deep sigh she leaned her head back against the cushioned padding of the old rocker.
She had been so tired lately!
More tired than usual.
Even the slight exertion needed to rock the chair was proving to be too much for her.
Sighing again, she closed her eyes as she had done so many times in her eighty
plus years,
and once again, her mind travelled back to her forever friend.
your heart be also."
Matthew 6:21
Twenty years? Maybe thirty?
Days and years seemed to run together now and remembering accurately, often very difficult.
But suddenly, a small smile began to play at the corners of her mouth.
"Fifty!" she exclaimed to herself. "I was fifty."
A time when some thought they had reached old age before they even knew what old age was!
More than thirty years had passed, yet there wasn't a day that she didn't think of him....
the small brown cottontail who had entered her life and heart in the spring of '98.
"Shoo-Fly". Again she breathed the beloved name. "Shoo".
In her mind's eye she saw the house where she had lived during this unusual friendship.
The evergreen trees along the back fence where she had first seen the litlle rabbit sitting in the morning sun.
"Go and see him", her husband had said. "He looks like he's waiting for something."
Were those trees still standing? Or had new owners over the previous years cut them down?
She remembered taking a little handful of parsley out to the little cottontail and a few of her house bunny's treats.
She smiled as she thought of the two uneaten sprigs she had collected the next day, bringing them into the house and later buying a small heart shaped box to put them into.
To this day the little box still sat on her dresser holding the precious green which signified the start of their friendship.
And,
beneath the larger of the evergreens,
she wondered if anyone had happened upon the three small stones placed together at the base of the tree and wondered at this curious formation.
Smiling again, she thought of the day she had put them there.
Shoo-Fly had been lying in the shade by the garden fence near where she stood holding the three stones.
"These stones are for us", she had told him. "A memorial to our friendship."
Were the stones still there? Had they gone unnoticed over the years...
or had someone removed them to plant flowers beneath the tree?
A tear trickled down her face...
and she wondered.
Page 2