rabtldy

     What brought us to that little southern town is probably best described as serendipity. The children's schedule called for them to be with their father until Monday after school. for some extraordinary reason, I had read the local paper three weeks prior and noted an outdoor festival was to be held on Sunday in a town about an hour away.

     It is important for me to tell you that seldom do I read the paper, and even more seldom do I take the children out of town. However, this time it was different. The weatherman called for rain, but it didn't . Something usually cropped up to prevent our excursions, and this time nothing did. We even left the house at the scheduled moment.

     We arrived in Laurinburg in pursuit of the park. Oddly, people we asked knew where the park was, but we never got any directions. Thinking the patrolman might help, I waved him down and asked directions, and instead of him telling us where it was, he showed us. We followed him closely behind thinking this must surely be a difficult place to find.

     The park was a green cookie cutter square surrounded on one side by tables of displays ablong a paved street, and a neat row of neighborhood houses on the other. Scattered around the park were insipid wood crafts, painted blocks of wood in crafts, painted blocks of wood in williamsburg colors, all cut in the shape of wreaths, mailboxes, geese, gingerbread children, and the like. All similar, all uninspired, and all with either a boasting tobacco barns, boats, or old homesteads. these were hardly a testimony to the human spirit of creativity. The day raced along with the wind gusting, filled with the music of the Highlander's pipes in the air above, and below with the ambling families and littel teenage covens with made-up faces. The sun seemed to caress only the smiling innocent faces of toddlers and the beaming enlightened faces of the aged. Even my usually unimpressionalbe children saw the wisdom and magic in the cheerfully wrinkled face of the Rabbit Lady.

     Was it any wonder that the Rabbit Lady drew and held the attention of us all? As we approached her, those who had been looking fell away and drifted off. From her table to the far corner of the park, all the eyes could behold were countless cages containing beautiful rabbits. These were not just any rabbits, bet extraordinary ones cloaked in the softest angora fur. There was one magical white one with two very pink eyes which peered out, unafraid, from the mass of fluff. When we came to "her" cage, she flipped the lid right open and stood up so we could touch her belly and ears. Her curiosity overwhelmed the children and their would be boredom, turning into amazement and delight. Even my son who would normally prefer harassing the girls, giggled like plucked guitar strings and dissolved into a computer program of questions.

     The Rabbit Lady herself, reminded me of a lighthouse as she turned patiently from one child to the next answering questions and pointing out interesting features of the bunnies. She noted that English Angora's were recognized by the mounds of tufts over their faces and feet while the French Angora's had little fur on them. Periodically the Rabbit Lady plucked their fur and spun it into year which she would later make into a scarf or sweater and selll. It was easy to see that the rabbits were the focus of her efforts and the spinning and knitting were merely examples of their reasons for being to a consumer society. To the Rabbit Lady her animals' being was all there was, anything else was just a bonus.