I had an uninvited guest in my house the other night.
As anyone who reads this column knows, my husband and I have a 21-pound orange cat,
Ashton, aka Fat Cat. Therefore, we have a cat door on the door going into our garage.
Ashton is so fat that he would prefer that we open the door for him to go out so he doesn’t have to squeeze through the cat door. Sometimes, if he sits and meows long enough, we will. He usually comes back in by himself, though.
On a recent night when my husband had taken one of his journalism classes to a meeting, I was home alone. I heard the cat door, so I glanced over, expecting to see Ashton. Instead, I saw something brown run across the living-room floor.
My first thought was a rat, because that would be my fear. When we had another cat, the infamous black bob-tailed cat named Bacon, he brought the remains of varmints to our door constantly. (My husband would inspect them and declare whether they were actually rats or mice.)
So, I looked more closely at the animal, and saw it was a cute, furry, baby bunny. Awww. So much better than a rat. I did what anyone in 2016 would do — I went to get my iPhone to video it.
When I turned around, the bunny was gone. I looked behind chairs, under the couch. No bunny. I went and got the Swiffer, and I poked, gently, under all the chairs and the beds. I looked in my closet. No bunny.
I texted my husband: “There is a bunny loose in our house.”
Finally, I gave up and watched TV.
The bunny had come in through the garage, which was open, and where Ashton was lounging. He is a big scaredy-cat with no killer instincts and no claws, which in this case is a good thing — at least for the bunny.
When my husband got home, he got a flashlight and started looking under furniture. He found the bunny under my older son’s old bed, which also has lots of boxes crammed under it.
I put an empty box on its side to block the door, and I draped myself over the bed and pulled stuff out on one side while my husband flushed the bunny out from the other. The bunny ran straight into the box and started scrambling trying to get out. My husband was carrying the box to the front door, but I stopped him so I could get a picture — and video. My husband was a little annoyed because the bunny was about to jump out. When the bunny got still, I noticed a little piece of something on his whiskers.
The bunny had a dust bunny stuck on its nose. I can’t imagine where that would have come from in our house.
My husband let the bunny out in the front yard, free to go find its family.
Our neighbors had just a few days before talked about how they’d accidentally disturbed a bunny family when they were doing yard work and hadn’t seen them since. I guess one got left behind.
The question everyone asked when I told them a bunny came into our house was, “Did you keep it?”
It never entered our minds to keep it. I had a wild bunny for a couple of days when I was a child, and I remember I cried when I had to release it.
We went to the Arkansas State Fair last weekend, and we walked through the rabbit exhibit barn. I saw rabbits that looked like they had thyroid problems, so big they were spilling out of their cages, and beautiful bunnies of all different colors — gray, brown, white, black and even black-and-white polka-dotted.
Maybe I should have kept the bunny — he might have turned out to be a prize winner.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.