The unexpected smell of an abandoned rabbit nest slow-smoked my nostrils a few summers ago as I cleaned out the rain garden. A messy mass of bunny fluff enticed my eyes to touch, but the stench of immured odor was fog-thick. The closest nasal resemblance is the unexcavated bottom of a hamper after one too many weeks of not doing laundry. Where the top layer still smells of normal-worn, and the middle starts to veer stale, the last layer - where the sweat has no choice but to mingle with the dust of our ever-sloughing skin - anaerobically combines into its own atmosphere of abandonment. The left to rot and then go rigid. The forgotten scents of winter wound up in the cavernous spiral of the rabbit’s warren. Bunnies give off no odor, so it must’ve been the fur of walls and wet of weather that created the cloud of drenched dog in dirty clothes.
Three years later and the mother rabbit still builds her home in that same spot. Yesterday, a trail of fur led 12 inches from the nest, a vintage wedding train of domesticity’s detritus. Is finding out you’ll never be married a cocktail of relief and rejection? Shaken, not stirred, but always fearing dilution. Was life still living in the nest, or had it been dragged out by any number of predators that lurk our wild yard?
I moved the trap door built of one big leaf to see a pile of fur rippling in slow motion like a couple under the sheets in a rhapsodic writhing of limbs, less a torture than a pleasure, but it’s hard to tell sometimes as we remember begging to be anchored all the while knowing what the drop does to the sand. The bottom of an anchor is called the crown, as is the head of humans as they push through the vaginal canal.
The gurgling layer of fur also resembled the lazy ripple of a waterbed if waterbeds were filled not with water but something more viscous, like mucus. An enclosed breath feeling its way around the silicone perimeter, trying to escape its own wicked imprisonment.
As the fur continued its breathing beneath the sheets, an animal turned inside out emerged from the leaves. Eyes closed, equipped with claws, and tho it appeared hairless, it was covered in a coarse mane of grey wood grain. My voice turned to turtle dove coo as I baby-talked to the bran-new being.
[I’d never seen the phrase “bran-new” til Reading Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and apparently the theory that the phrase relates to items being protectively packaged with unused grain is a folktale, yet I will choose to believe it knowing there’s not a lot of evidence to prove it. The faith I don’t have in God, I easily have in folk-origin etymology.]
Could it hear my cooing?
Was the mother who never fears me or Jim watching from behind the Gingko tree?
I am also newly emerging but cozily unwatched.
Reemerging and Trying to Describe the Sensation of Seeing & Smelling