When I retired a few years ago, after spending several weeks gradually clearing my office, after I gifted many professional books to colleagues, after I offered several bins of picture books to teachers for classroom libraries, after I placed materials that were looking for a new home in the faculty room, and after I made my final good-bye walk…I left with one cardboard carton of mementos. That box still sits in the corner of my office, and in it is a blue binder of poems I used throughout the years, mostly for students who needed help with fluency. I often started sessions with a poem that we read in different ways throughout the week, so it is not surprising that many of them stuck in my head.
 
I referenced one of those poems in yesterday’s slice, and today my waking thoughts were of another poem, Jack Prelutsky’s “Last Night I Dreamed of Chickens.” Except it was rabbits, not chickens, that had hopped into my dreams. You see, on CBS’ Sunday Morning yesterday, there was a segment about rabbits that totally fascinated me. I had no idea that there were over forty different types of rabbits and hundreds of breeders across the country. Not only that, rabbits are shown in competitions that are much like dog shows. Don’t get me wrong, having grown up in the shadow of the annual PA Farm Show, I am well aware that animals like pigs, cows, horses, and turkeys are often entered into competition, but I just never thought about rabbits having their own competitions or even that there are so many kinds.
 
In my dreams last night I was walking a rabbit on the trail instead of my dog, Cyrus. And what’s more, all of the animals walking on the trail were rabbits. Where were the dogs, I wonder? Hmmm…maybe there’s a picture book in there somewhere.