So I have usually associated the word resurrection with the season of Easter in the spring but around here we had a double resurrection at the solstice.
We had 3 does who all kindled on the 21st and had 11, 10 and 7 kits each. The next morning I took the dogs on fence patrol and and fed the cows before really checking on the rabbits. This is the reverse of my usual pattern. When I got to the rabbits and pulled out the nest box from Yummy, who had the 10 kits, my heart sank. There in the front of the box were 5 uncovered kits that were cold and still. And to make matters worse they were the amber ones, one of the colors I’ve been trying to get. I picked them up and was considering where to put them when I just decided NOT to give up so quickly. I stuck all five of them into my camisole, right next to my skin and quickly finished feeding the rest of the rabbits. Then I went into the kitchen and heated a bowl of water, and placed all 5 in an open zip-lock bag in the bowl for a few minutes. When they no longer felt chilled, I heated some work socks in the microwave and put the kits back into my shirt and tucked the socks around them.
I spent the next couple of hours in the orchard pruning the last of the apple trees that still had leaves and chopping the branches up to fit in to boxes ready to feed to the rabbits. I kept my jacket on, even though I felt kind of hot because I wanted to be sure those kits were warm.
Every so often I would take a peek in my shirt at the kits and was amazed to feel them starting to squirm around. I rearranged them a few times so that they wouldn’t slip out and by the afternoon I began to think that maybe some of them would survive! By the time I got back to the barn ALL of them were moving around and there was even some squeaking coming from a couple of them. I decided to tuck them back into the nest with their 5 other liter-mates and see how they did. I continued to check on them several times a day for the next couple of days and to slide them to the back of the nest box if I ever found them in the front again. Unbelievably, all five kits are now fat and active along with the other 5 who never had the chill experience.
Along with everything else that goes on around here we periodically check the water tank on the back of our property that fills the stock tank for our cows. We have no water to that part or our place but we have a kind neighbor who has an irrigation well that has an outlet very close to our tank. He has been willing to fill our small tank as we need it over the last year. Unfortunately on Tuesday when my husband discovered that our storage tank AND the stock tank were both empty we found that our neighbor had gone to Mexico for trabajo and his wife had no idea when he would be back, nor did she know how to operate the well pump. Well, when I got the news from my husband that the tank was empty the first thing I asked him was, “What about my goldfish?” I have taken no small pleasure in watching those fish grow over the year that they have been keeping the algae down in that tank so I was sad to have him tell me, “They’re dead.”
Since we couldn’t fill the tank from our neighbors’ nearby pump, we loaded every cooler we could find and several large trash into the back of our pick up and filled them with water. We then took a careful drive up the hill of our pasture and over to the back. Before we transferred the water into the stock tank, I gazed down at the bodies of the goldfish and then reach down to touch one. It Moved! I touched another one. It moved too! I excitedly urged my husband to, ”HURRY!” As we were pouring the water from each cooler, I kept checking to see if I saw any fish swimming in their reconstituted pool. I thought that I saw at least one swimming down there in the murk. And sure enough, the next day when we went back to check on how much water was in the tank. I stood and watched and was able to see that ALL 6 of those goldfish were indeed swimming around in their replenished tank.
So, as we walked back up to the top of our hill, I turned toward the west and watched that winter sun sink into the Pacific on the shortest day of the year and gave thanks to Mother Earth for these small miracles and announced to my husband that , “Summer is coming!”
We had 3 does who all kindled on the 21st and had 11, 10 and 7 kits each. The next morning I took the dogs on fence patrol and and fed the cows before really checking on the rabbits. This is the reverse of my usual pattern. When I got to the rabbits and pulled out the nest box from Yummy, who had the 10 kits, my heart sank. There in the front of the box were 5 uncovered kits that were cold and still. And to make matters worse they were the amber ones, one of the colors I’ve been trying to get. I picked them up and was considering where to put them when I just decided NOT to give up so quickly. I stuck all five of them into my camisole, right next to my skin and quickly finished feeding the rest of the rabbits. Then I went into the kitchen and heated a bowl of water, and placed all 5 in an open zip-lock bag in the bowl for a few minutes. When they no longer felt chilled, I heated some work socks in the microwave and put the kits back into my shirt and tucked the socks around them.
I spent the next couple of hours in the orchard pruning the last of the apple trees that still had leaves and chopping the branches up to fit in to boxes ready to feed to the rabbits. I kept my jacket on, even though I felt kind of hot because I wanted to be sure those kits were warm.
Every so often I would take a peek in my shirt at the kits and was amazed to feel them starting to squirm around. I rearranged them a few times so that they wouldn’t slip out and by the afternoon I began to think that maybe some of them would survive! By the time I got back to the barn ALL of them were moving around and there was even some squeaking coming from a couple of them. I decided to tuck them back into the nest with their 5 other liter-mates and see how they did. I continued to check on them several times a day for the next couple of days and to slide them to the back of the nest box if I ever found them in the front again. Unbelievably, all five kits are now fat and active along with the other 5 who never had the chill experience.
Along with everything else that goes on around here we periodically check the water tank on the back of our property that fills the stock tank for our cows. We have no water to that part or our place but we have a kind neighbor who has an irrigation well that has an outlet very close to our tank. He has been willing to fill our small tank as we need it over the last year. Unfortunately on Tuesday when my husband discovered that our storage tank AND the stock tank were both empty we found that our neighbor had gone to Mexico for trabajo and his wife had no idea when he would be back, nor did she know how to operate the well pump. Well, when I got the news from my husband that the tank was empty the first thing I asked him was, “What about my goldfish?” I have taken no small pleasure in watching those fish grow over the year that they have been keeping the algae down in that tank so I was sad to have him tell me, “They’re dead.”
Since we couldn’t fill the tank from our neighbors’ nearby pump, we loaded every cooler we could find and several large trash into the back of our pick up and filled them with water. We then took a careful drive up the hill of our pasture and over to the back. Before we transferred the water into the stock tank, I gazed down at the bodies of the goldfish and then reach down to touch one. It Moved! I touched another one. It moved too! I excitedly urged my husband to, ”HURRY!” As we were pouring the water from each cooler, I kept checking to see if I saw any fish swimming in their reconstituted pool. I thought that I saw at least one swimming down there in the murk. And sure enough, the next day when we went back to check on how much water was in the tank. I stood and watched and was able to see that ALL 6 of those goldfish were indeed swimming around in their replenished tank.
So, as we walked back up to the top of our hill, I turned toward the west and watched that winter sun sink into the Pacific on the shortest day of the year and gave thanks to Mother Earth for these small miracles and announced to my husband that , “Summer is coming!”
