Do I dare to hope, do I dare to hope—with every footfall, some version of this, as I walked around the neighborhood, thinking about how my default is anticipatory grief. But every walk I took held the promise of a bunny sighting in someone’s yard. You won’t read it in the annals of history, but summer 2024 in Nashville, Tennessee, was a banner one for bunnies. The neighborhood was suddenly flush with bunnies and when I wasn’t noticing bunnies, my brain pointed toward trucks. It didn’t have to search far. I took pictures of old pickups, imagining a photo essay for the socials, #pickupsofeastnash. 4Runners of more recent vintage I eyed admiringly, also Rav4s, which are not trucks per se but are built on a truck chassis (I love the word chassis), and have been my object of desire for some time as I’ve considered our next auto purchase, the projected cost of which has caused me no small anxiety. Along the way of many neighborhood walks, I began to question my plan. We could buy a cheaper yet safe car for our newly minted teen driver, rather than giving her mine and buying me a new one. She could have what she wanted—an automatic. I would stick with my stick (I love to drive manual). Later, in good time, I could become a woman with a truck. An old woman with a truck. Was this what I wanted? I walked the neighborhood, spying bunnies and trucks, and I thought about Thalia, her swift passage through the halls of high school, how we seem to be picking up speed, prepping for takeoff, only I have no idea where the flight is headed or how I even got on it. Weren’t we just at Target, where I laughed so hard when she came around the corner in the holiday sale section carrying a roll of gift wrap almost as tall as herself, pretending to be (as she told me in a seven-year-old’s approximation of creaky-old-lady voice) an old lady walking with a cane? Did I start that “list of things to teach her” in my Notes app? If I did, I can’t find it. I’ve got to make sure she knows that when you set up house, you should line the kitchen shelves. She says she wants a Diva cup, I’ve got to get her one. On walks I eyed not only trucks and bunnies but houses for sale, some of which I’d snap pictures of and send to my father, as if to say, Lookahere, y’all could live in this lovely one and be so close to us! Such a sweet street! Two blocks over! I thought about how this was likely never going to happen, he and mom were never going to buy one of these houses and move close to me, they love their life where they are too much, I could hardly even picture a scene from that fiction, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the possibility of it on my walks. It became another summer motif. I walked through brat summer, bumpinthatbumpinthatbumpinthat, but also it was kamala summer, chappell summer, cicada summer, neil young summer (for me alone), jack white summer. Jack White put out a new album and wore his hair just like he did when he was young, which seemed to be part of the performance because the songs, too, felt like a return, a revisit. Which the people loved. And we felt forever young. And the marketing was sheer genius. I wondered how much of it was Jack and how much was the very smart people that work for Jack. I walked and played air guitar. Do I dare to hope, do I dare to hope, I thought—every footfall, some version of this. I wore sunscreen, but only on my face. I remembered bouts of light teenage suicidal ideation. I remembered high school boyfriends, the hours spent with them. I thought about how downtown Nashville, in its current state of becoming—and especially when observed from my car on I-65—reminds me of a young forest, full of saplings popping up. I walked and threw peace fingers to the people in cars at intersections. I walked and thought about the damaged soft tissue in my knee, tissue I could feel but could not see; was it getting better, worse? Could I walk it well? I pictured that soft tissue like a pale deep-sea creature with a ruffled edge, or maybe a grapefruit section. I knew this was not even close to reality. Our bodies are full of soft tissue—I googled it. “Essential for normal, pain-free movement.” Soft tissue is fat, nerves, blood vessels, ligaments, tendons, muscles, the heart. I cried—once? My airpods delivered messages straight into my ears in a female robot voice. I paused on the sidewalk to respond on Slack. I listened to a podcast or two. Do I dare to hope, do we dare to hope? I thought, Here’s the thing: Y’all don’t really want to write so much as y’all want people to listen to you. Did I want someone to listen to me? My parents could still go on their Sonic dates if they lived over here; there’s a Sonic just up the road. I thought about ice cream, ice cream, ice cream, how in summer I wanted to eat nothing but. I thought about the Sex Chair 4 Sex, which sits—wingback, overstuffed, darkly upholstered, spray-painted red with the phrase that announces its purpose—in a vacant lot on Gallatin Pike, how the sight of it makes me and Thalia laugh, how you’ll see it there one day, perched on the concrete slab where once sat a hot-chicken shack, and the next day it’ll be legs up, tumped over in the bushes at the back of the lot, barely visible from your car speeding past. And a few days later it returns, upright, centered, and advertising itself again, etc. I’m sure my daughter told her boyfriend about it, via text. I walked and I thought about the bunny in our front yard and how tame he was, how my husband said hello to him every morning, was able to get so close to him, almost able to reach out and touch him. Until one day I came home and got out of my car and there he was, eternally still by the black-eyed susans. I went and told my husband, and he buried the bunny, and we were sad together, speculating about what happened. Was he sick? Was it something we’d done? I had liked the way Todd referred to the bunny as a bunny (I love the word bunny), but the other afternoon I heard him talking to our neighbor and he said, Our rabbit died, man—did I tell you about our rabbit? And I thought, was this a kind of dude-specific code-switching? There are still bunnies to be seen all around, but if you approach them, they run fast.
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Such a banner summer for bunnies! I keep wondering if it's related to the cicadas - are there cottontail predators that were eating cicadas instead?
good one, susannah.