I wanted to do something for Easter for my grandchildren so they would remember me when I am gone. So I gathered up the courage to cut up a quilt my grandmother made for me and stitched five bunnies. Then I wrote a story explaining the quilt turned bunny and printed a little book with the following story.
Bunny opened her eyes, and the very first thought, she thought was, “Where am I?”
Using her left paw, Bunny brushed an ear out of her face and spent some time inspecting her limbs.
“What is this? I have a paw, two paws. I have two feet. I have an ear? Wait, I have two ears,” she said, pulling down on each side as if to challenge them to stay fastened to her head.
Bunny looked down past her where her belly button should be. She wriggled her feet, dangling dangerously over the edge of wherever she was sitting.
“I have legs. I have arms. I have ears. But, who am I?”
The room was very dark around the edges. Cutting through the center, a slanted box of light from December’s full moon created a cool white tunnel across the floor.
If she could see, Bunny must have eyes. She raised her paws, and covered them, then uncovered them, then covered them again. When she uncovered them a second time, Bunny could begin to see the outline of objects in the unfamiliar room. Shadows mostly. The floor looked far away. Bunny was somewhat afraid of heights. Without moving any closer to the edge, Bunny tried to make out some of the things below. What is she sitting on?
In one corner, Bunny could see what looked like a rocking chair. Motionless. The seat was piled high with a tangled heap of fur, arms, legs, ears, and plastic eyes shining in the moonlight.
“Those creatures look like me, only different,” Bunny thought. “But why am I up here alone and not in the heap?”
Across the room, Bunny could see a quilt-shaped mummy-like bundle on the bed.
How could she know what a bed is if she hardly knew what she was? The shape was not very long or very wide. The blanket was stitched from many squares and triangles of colorful fabric stitched together.
Bunny used her arms to rub her belly. It was soft and worn and stitched together from many pieces of fabric. Even in the moonlight, she knew her body and limbs looked very much like the blanket on the bed.
It was all very confusing to Bunny and somewhat frightening at the same time.
“How did I get here?”
“How indeed,” said a voice. On top of a small wooden box filled with tiny treasures like stones and pennies was a spider. It looked silver in the moonlight, but spiders aren’t silver, are they?
“Where did you come from?” Bunny asked. “How did you get way up here from way down there?”
“Oh, I dropped in from up there,” Spider pointed to the ceiling and proceeded to crawl up Bunny’s leg to sit in her lap.
It tickled. Out of curiosity, Bunny did not try and swipe it away.
“I can tell you a story, your story, my friend,” he said. “For I have been with this sleeping child since birth he said pointing at the figure on the bed. This was my home before it was this family’s home. I know many things because I travel from room to room. But only at night.”
“So, you know who I am?” Bunny asked. “Do you know how I got here? Why can’t I play with the rest of the stuffed animals?”
“So many questions,” Spider said. “I do indeed know how you got here. You are a very special bunny, which is why you are here and not in the pile of toys on that chair over there.” Spider again pointed one of eight legs in the direction of the rocker. The moon was sinking in the west, and more and more light came directly into the room. Soon the moon would disappear below the window sill. The cool white light would be replaced by the light of dawn.
“We should hurry before the sun comes up,” Spider said. “The family will be waking soon.”
“Family?”
“Yes,” Spider said. “You belong to a family. And you must never forget who you are.”
“So, who am I?” Bunny wasn’t sure about the forgetting part since she recently became aware of anything and didn’t realize her not remembering anything was because she was both new and old at the same time. Bunny decided it was best to listen.
“Many years ago, more than 50 years,” Spider began. “The story of how you became a bunny begins in McIntosh County, North Dakota. It is the story of a German-Russian farm family and its future generations. It all leads to how you became a bunny.”
The Story
Life was simple, before the world moved on, before the days of decadence and unlimited supplies, families had to do with what they had.
Nothing was wasted. Everything that could be put to use in some manner after it outlived its original usefulness was recycled. This practice of frugality has been around long before the word recycle was spoken. Back then, it was the way.
In the Great Plains, it was common for families to farm. It took acres of land and many hands to survive in a state of very little rain and fierce unrelenting winds. Children were more plentiful than trees.
Such were the children, 12 of them, to be exact, of Emma and Albert, first-generation Americans born to German-Russian immigrants.
North Dakota had only been a state for nine years when Albert was born. His family settled in McIntosh County near Beaver Creek.
Everything the family had, except the few things that could not survive the cold of the north, was grown or raised on the farm. There were eggs, milk, cream, pork, chicken, and beef. Milk was made into cheese and butter.
In the summer months, the garden provided vegetables like beets, cabbage, beans, peas, and watermelon. The fields produced wheat for flour and corn and spelt for animal feed. The soil had to be plowed and the rocks removed before any planting could take place. It was hard work.
At first, houses were built from sod bricks. Without electricity, Bible study was done each evening with kerosene lamps. The daily bread was baked with stoves fueled with corn cobs and cow dung bricks.
All the children had to do chores from the time they could carry pails of water and feed for the chickens and geese. Geese provided food and feathers for pillows on beds shared by three or four children. Houses were heated with coal or wood-burning stoves. It must have been very cold in the house because, on winter mornings blankets were covered with frost.
In the summer, children had to go to the pastures where the cattle ate the grass and turned cow pies over so they would dry in the hot sun. Then, they were collected and saved for fueling the ovens.
To keep things cold, butter and milk were lowered into the ground where the water well was dug. A root cellar with an arched doorway was built underneath the frost line where all winter long the family kept potatoes, squash, canned goods, and ever-lasting yeast.
It took a lot of work to feed 12 children.
There are more memories from those days without electricity than there were toys and clothes. Dresses were sewn, shared, and washed on Mondays in case there were weddings in the middle of the week or for church on Sundays.
Not a single scrap of fabric was wasted. Clothing that was too tattered to be worn was cut into squares and sewed into quilts or rugs. Even the buttons were cut from shirts and sewn onto postcards to be used in making new garments.
When those 12 children grew and married, many moved to the land surrounding their parent’s farm. They took with them very little by way of possessions, but there was a wealth of knowledge and a solid work ethic to help them start families and farms of their own.
“Albert and Emma were the great-great-grandparents of the small child over there,” Spider once again pointed one of his eight legs at the quilted bundle on the bed.
Lorraine, one of the 12 children of Albert and Emma, married and moved farther away from the farm than the rest of her siblings. She and her husband, Adam, had five children and lived in a small town less than 30 miles from the farm.
Feeding a family that large required a great garden. Nothing was wasted, and everything grown or foraged was turned into some kind of food. At the peak of harvest in the summer, the children ate slices of tomatoes sprinkled with sugar for a bedtime snack. In the morning, they drank juice made from the rhubarb growing plentiful in the back yard.
Lorraine used the fabric from her mother’s skirts to make dresses for her two little girls. Yes, there were hand-me-downs. Life was simple. The children didn’t notice what they didn’t have growing up. There was nothing to compare.
When the children grew and one by one went off to college, they were each gifted a quilt. The quilt was made by their Grandma Emma, with the pieces cut from scraps of fabric that Mom saved from their outgrown dresses and home economics projects.
Sue used her blanket. After all, that’s what it was for, to sleep under and dream happy dreams about the future. By the time Sue was married and had two children, Claire and Adam, the quilt was washed and washed so many times it began to fray. Some of the fabrics were so thin the inside of the quilt was exposed. The back of the quilt was faded in spots from blue to nearly white.
The squares of that quilt held too many precious memories to throw away. So, Sue folded it and carefully placed it in a trunk or a drawer as moved from town to town for more than 50 years.
“During those years, Sue’s children had children,” Spider said. “That’s when she became Grandma Sue BB to the child sleeping soundly over there.” When Spider turned his head, he saw the room changing color from night to day and knew he had to finish the story quickly.
One day, Grandma Sue BB began thinking about the quilt lying in the drawer, neglected and threadbare. It was of no use to anyone there, she thought. “I will fashion myself a jacket from that quilt. That way I could wear the handiwork of my grandmother, and my mother,” she said.
It didn’t take too long to realize that it didn’t make sense to cut the quilt into a coat. So Grandma Sue BB thought and thought and thought. Easter was coming, and she needed something handmade for the Easter baskets she had so much fun filling each year.
Bunnies. Grandma Sue BB could make bunnies from the quilt. Each of the grandchildren would have something to cherish that was touched by the hands of their grandma, great-grandma, and great-great grandma. A stuffed bunny that connected five generations of memories, good and bad and the quilt would be put to good use finally.
Bunny looked at her paws, then the little child on the bed, and then the spider.
“That’s me,” Bunny asked. “I am the old quilt?”
“Yes,” Spider said, “You were sewn by Grandma Sue BB in 2024. That makes you at least 50 years old.”
“Why can’t I be new,” asked Bunny. “Like those toys on the chair over there?”
“Because you are so special,” said Spider. “You are meant to be cherished and taken care of. After all your fabric has been washed and hung in the sun and touched by hands so often, it’s almost threadbare.”
“So it’s me? I’m the threadbare bunny.”
“Yes, and you should be very proud to hold several lifetimes of love and handiwork so the grandchildren will always remember where they came from,” Spider said.
“But, do I have a name,” asked Bunny.
Spider laughed, “Each of the five grandchildren will be giving you a name. They can choose. And, they can write that name right here.”
“Maybe someday, they will have children and can pass this story to them with the bunny,” Spider said, and promptly spun himself straight up to the ceiling and disappeared as the door to the bedroom opened.
INDYchildrendotme 
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