Hi, all, Daniel-of-2018, here, feeling...wistful.
I woke up thinking about Charlie last night and could not get back to sleep. I can't really tell you the contents of those thoughts, we're not there yet in the story, but the night has left me both sleep-deprived and melancholy. Perhaps my thoughts landed thus because we're preparing for Lammas and I've been calling a lot of people I don't normally talk to, gathering the tribe, so to speak, and so I think of the past.
But you know Charlie through my words, and can appreciate my thoughts without knowing exactly what they were. So let me tell a brief Charlie story, one of my favorites, though it doesn't fit in to my history any place--for one thing, I don't remember precisely when it happened, though I was wearing brown at the time, so I must have been a candidate.
I was walking along beside the row of trees that separated the farm from the rest of campus, and I saw Charlie on the path that leads through the row and into the farm. He probably knew I was there, he knew most such things, but I can't be sure because he did not react to my presence at all. He's been hunting woodchucks and carried his game bag and his bow, but his bow was unstrung. He was done hunting for the day. And this rabbit approached him. I mean it hopped right up to him and looked at him. He looked at it--he may have spoken to it, I was too far away to hear--and then walked on, but the rabbit followed. This time man approached rabbit, maybe to test how close he could get, and the rabbit hopped away. So Charlie continued on his way, but was followed by the rabbit.
Now, Charlie did just hunt woodchucks and deer, he also hunted rabbits, and sometimes squirrels. Anything likely to interfere with our farming could find itself harvested if it entered our fields while Charlie had his bow strung. I've eaten rabbits he has killed. But when he found himself once again being followed by this abnormally friendly rabbit, he turned and spoke to it kindly. I still couldn't hear his words, but I could see his face and it shone with a kind of fond amusement.
The rabbit looked up at him and then picked up a small it of stick in its mouth and threw the stick some feet with a jerk of its head. Charlie looked at the rabbit for a few seconds, considering, and then he fetched and returned the stick. The rabbit threw it again, and again Charlie fetched it. And so on for some minutes, until a dog barked and the rabbit ran away.
I later learned that a wild rabbit someone had raised as a pet had been released on our property, and of course that must have been the rabbit I saw. A few other people saw it, too, and then after a few weeks it disappeared, probably eaten by something, but not by any off us. And what sticks in my mind is that image of the man and the rabbit playing fetch together early one summer morning before breakfast.
I can't stay in this mood long, I've got to get to work so I can get certain tasks out of the way in time to take the holiday off. And as usual, I'm slightly unprepared, since I should have written the interlude post last week so that I could write the Lammas post this week. Everything is disorganized. Time has a way of running out. Maybe I'll write a second post this week, for the holiday?
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And now I've been interrupted again--it's almost four and I need to pick my daughter up from her friend's house and I'd better send this off before anything else gets out of wack. Use the time you have, I guess I'm saying.
-best, D.
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