When I was very young, my mother gave me a ceramic bunny. It looked just like this one. In my memory, it looked exactly like this one…only for some reason I really think the one I had was a bit bigger. Not much, but a bit. I may be wrong about that. I haven’t seen that bunny in years. I suppose it might still be hanging around in some box or the back of a drawer someplace, nestled safely enough to be forgotten over however many years and however many moves, but more likely that poor bunny just got lost at some point along the way.
Like I said, that’s not the bunny my mother gave me. I know this because anyone who has ever gifted a three- or four-year-old with something ceramic knows what inevitably happens to such things: I dropped the bunny one day, and he broke. I don’t remember dropping it, and I don’t remember being upset, but I know that I would have been heartbroken by this development. I know this not just because I know how I am and how I get upset to this day when I break things that are meaningful. I also know this because Mom fixed the bunny.
She did the best she could. I don’t know if she didn’t really know how to use superglue, or even what such glue options would have been available to her in the early 1970s when this would have happened, which might be why she didn’t glue it. She taped him back together with masking tape. And honestly? She did a fine job, and that tape held. For years. And years. And years. The joints were tight and my bunny was solid, even when he shouldn’t have been.
After Mom died, I found myself missing my little brown ceramic bunny. Surely there was no chance of ever finding an actual replacement for something that she had to have bought cheaply nearly 50 years ago…but I went searching nonetheless. I did the best I could: I searched eBay for “brown ceramic rabbit”.
I found him almost immediately…and I found a few friends for him.
It was not a hard choice to make. There were a number of sets of these bunnies available at the time (this was a little over a year ago), and it turned out that they were made by a company called Goebel, a German outfit that makes porcelain figurines and which also owns Hummel, a more famous figurine maker. I chose one set of three and bought it. A week or two later, I had my bunny again…along with two friends.
The three bunnies all sit now atop my desk just in front of the Four Musketeers. This seems fitting, in some small and odd way.
I never asked Mom if she remembered the little brown ceramic bunny or her fixing him with masking tape. Add that to the list of conversations that went unspoken, I suppose.
