Peter Oliver

After a rather hectic day at work, the Mrs and I were rushing to the store to get a nice bottle of wine to share before they quit selling (9pm in Milwaukee). It was one of those cold rainy days where everything seems a little bit darker and a little bit eerier than usual. As I was driving along I saw a strange lump in the road. I slowed down to further inspect this strange lump which, from a distance, looked like a kitten huddled in the middle of the road. Once we got close enough we realized it was not a kitten but a rabbit. It was black and white, cold and shivering and scared out of its mind as it, quite obviously, was out of its normal environment.

As I inched closer to the shuddering wet mass, it quite slowly hopped to the sde of the road where it lay in the gutter with near freezing water rushing around it. We decided that we could not, in good conscience, leave the poor rabbit to this fate.

We went back home where we got an old milk crate and a piece of plexiglass to catch the rabbit in and ran back to the place we had left him in the gutter. We managed, quite easily, to capture the rabbit in the milk crate and use the plexi-glass as a cover to keep him confined as we walked him back home.

Since our cats would not have approved of our new found furry friend in the house, we decided to place him down in the basement in a small room with which we could keep him in and the cats out. We placed an old blanket on the floor for a bed and fetched some food and water for our new addition in case he was starving as well as wet and cold. We left him there as we ascended the stairs towards our bottle of wine and the end of the day.

When morning came, we went back down stairs to check on our run away and were quite dismayed to see him laying on the cold concrete floor with very deliberate breathing. He was dry now but his food and water lay untouched. I picked him up and placed him on the blanket to offer some small token of comfort as we made plans to call the humane society to see if they could help. We never made it to the stairs. With one more breath we could see his body go limp and his eyes glaze over. A few brief death twitches later his body lay motionless, forver.

We left him there for the day and made plans for a burial later that evening. We placed him in a tissue paper lined shoe box and wrapped a ribbon around his neck. We placed some carrots in his casket with him as offerings to help him on the long journey ahead. In the darkness of the night we buried him underneath our Bridal Wreath bush which is to be his final resting spot. The ribbon around his neck carried a tag. It read:

Peter (as in Cottontail) Oliver (as in twist)