The Little Bunny Who Could

When I was a young child, there were two books that I took out of our town’s public library so many times, I can still visualize where they stood in the stacks.   One of them, Dubose Heyward’s The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes, is STILL a favorite read at the Muthupandiyan house . . . especially at Easter time. 

It’s amazing how timeless good stories are.  Written in 1939, The Country Bunny is tale about a little tawny colored country bunny whose childhood dream is to become one of the five Easter Bunnies who deliver eggs to the children around the world on Easter eve.  All the big bunnies tell her to forget it, it will never happen . . . after all, she’s a little brown girl from the country, and she’s got to concern herself with the sort of things that that sort of life will afford her — having babies and keeping a clean house. 

She grows up, has 21 little bunnies . . . and while she raises to take care of the house and one another, she never stops dreaming about becoming an Easter bunny. 

As a child who loved to play house, I was fascinated with Marjorie Flack’s pastel tinted watercolor drawings that depicted the country bunny’s perfectly ordered domestic life — the drawings of children  bunnies tending the garden and doing the laundry and making art for the walls of the home.  The very thought of is every a child’s dream — to play while keeping a little house of one’s own. 

. . . and the book explores every adult’s dream as well — to be able to hold on to one’s childhood passions into adulthood and see them realized, no matter what other dreams have come along.  As a family of readers you need not wonder whether the little country bunny will become an Easter bunny, she does!  And as readers of all ages get to accompany her on her first adventure, we are captivated by the tests of character that await her as the newest Easter Bunny. 

There’s no doubt, in the end, that she will succeed, for after all, it is her wisdom and kindness, and the agility she developed while raising her own children that are the key to her becoming an Easter bunny in the first place. . .

There’s a second gift that comes in the form of re-reading stories we loved as children .  . . and reading the book today, the Country Bunny is as much my heroine as she ever was.  I highly recommend it at Easter time, or any time, for every child . . . and every parent who ever was!