Young ones.

I walked to the officehouse this evening to photocopy the syllabus for my summer course, which begins early tomorrow morning. When I returned to my house (which has entered new phases of utter relocation-related disarray; half of one room's curtains migrated today, newly washed and ironed and starched), a rabbit bounded out of the hostas near my front porch and came to a stop in the yard. As I stepped into the porch, though, I could hear some continued rustling in the ground cover near the hostas. Peeking through the screen, I discovered


this small klatsch of bunnies. They were huddling and quivering together, doing their best to stay very still but still slipping about in the ground cover. I grabbed the camera and took their picture before they could disappear (their mother fled--temporarily, I trust--when I reemerged from the house and stepped out of the porch). When I came back from putting the camera away, they had gone.

My parents told me a story yesterday about the robins they're watching outside their house in Indiana. The young one fell out of the nest recently and eeped about on the ground for awhile. Eep eep, they heard the robin saying. Eep! Eep eep! Finally, it eeped around the side of the house and was gone. A few days later, the robin appeared with its mother, looking for food, and the two eeped at each other all the while. Eep eep, the mother said, getting the young one to follow her. Eep eep eep, the young one said, trying to persuade its mother to catch a worm for it. Eep eep eep eep, the mother said, telling the young one to get the worm for itself.

They were just like you and your mother, my father said.

* * *

I had one other cameraworthy encounter on the way home from the officehouse. The cat was all but eeping, too.