I have a picture of me, aged two plus, watching while Edie feeds an orphaned baby rabbit with an eyedropper. This may have been how my obsession with bunnies and rabbits began. I was particularly fascinated by the Easter Bunny. He was male—that much was clear—but he had a basketful of coloured eggs that he couldn’t have laid himself. Hens laid eggs, rabbits didn’t; but if they did, they would have be female rabbits. Was there a Mrs. Easter Bunny? Was there a concealed hen that nobody had seen fit to mention? It was a puzzle. “Why are there so many eggs in your writing?” I was asked at a literary event. I came out with something about the perfect form, the primal symbolism. But perhaps it goes back to Edie and the baby rabbit and the egg-carrying Easter Bunny.
Or possibly the ur-influence was the bunny cookies. This story was a staple of my mother’s. She had to go to a tea party in Ottawa—not her favourite thing, as she had to put on a dress and a hat and make polite conversation with strangers—but the wives of junior government employees were expected to go to tea parties thrown by the wives of senior government employees. (Babysitters were an extravagance, which is how I got taken to the film of Henry V, with Laurence Olivier, when I was four or five. I am told I sat very still: no doubt I was baffled as well as petrified, as I had never seen a film before. But I remember the archery scene very well.) The senior tea-party wife, knowing there would be children, had supplied a plateful of cookies shaped like rabbits and decorated with icing sugar. I was given one bunny cookie. Wasn’t I going to eat it? I was asked. No, I said. I just wanted to talk to it. (My belief that I could communicate with inanimate objects—including, on occasion, certain people—persisted for years.) Meanwhile, my brother waited for his chance, made off with the rest of the plateful, ate all the cookies, and was sick later.
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