It’s April 1993, and I have just woken up on the living room couch. My eyes feel a bit sore from trying to stay awake in order to catch a certain creature hopping through my home.
Gosh, how I would have loved to have caught that white-haired—or brown-haired animal, red (dye) handed—with a now-naked hardboiled egg on the floor beneath him or her and a half eaten carrot in the opposite paw.
But I didn't catch what I had imagined to be a five-foot, eight-inch bunny, that night. In fact, all I caught was the back of my eye lids, and whatever I dreamt that night (probably sweet succulent dreams of chocolate eggs filled with caramel...
I couldn’t say if it was the year after that—or five years later that I discovered the truth behind the Easter Bunny, but each year I still debate sleeping on that couch, straining my eyes until they can’t take it to catch my five- foot, eight-inch tall mother in the act of hiding an egg behind a picture frame and another behind the pillow of the opposing couch. Was it a coincidence that the bunny I had imagined and my mother were the same height?
I like to base it on good intuition—but I can’t be the only one who believed the Easter Bunny was the height of a point guard and so petite in size. I definitely couldn’t have been the only one to have put all my eggs in one basket that a bunny would stand on two feet and develop thumbs for just that night. I mean does anyone actually imagine a small rodent sized bunny lurking through their home?—Even if this would be more realistic?
Either way, I have never caught my mother hiding eggs or popping jellybeans into a basket full of grass. I have never caught her stealing the carrots that I leave on the kitchen table, and I have never found the Easter candy she buys weeks in advance.
A part of me hopes I never will. A part of me hopes the magical thought of a five-foot, eight-inch tall bunny frolicking through my two-floor home never does disappear. And who knows, maybe in some odd fantastical, wonderful way, the Easter Bunny still does exist—or maybe my mom has her own secrets.
Maybe, even she attempts to still keep the magic alive by hiding a bunny suit in her closet, that she sports once a year to prance around the living room in—with an egg in one hand, and a half eaten carrot in the other. Maybe, she too hopes I will never strain my eyes long enough to catch the wonderful, magnificent, five-foot, eight-inch tall Easter Bunny in the act.
I guess I’ll never know.
Libby Segal is a recent graduate of the University of Rhode Island where she studied Communication Studies and Film Media, who currently lives in New York City.