Baby in arms, I drew up the shade, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but my front yard full of brightly colored paper bunnies.
It took me a bit of sleuthing in the form of a walk through the neighborhood to discover that it was a neighbor a few houses down from ours who'd bunnied our front yard along with their own.
Anyway, the first sight of those paper bunnies so surprised and delighted me that I decided that from then on every Easter morning I would rise at dawn to bunny our front yard and that of our kind neighbor.
Back then we lived in Whitehall, an urban suburb of Columbus Ohio. I believe I kept up the Easter bunnying tradition for at least a couple of years, cutting out bunnies on construction paper from a cardboard template I made, then taping the paper bunnies onto bamboo skewers which I stuck into the lawns on Easter morning,
We moved from Whitehall to Gahanna, the next suburb over, shortly before the birth of baby number four. I don't remember how many years went by, but eventually - when my children were old enough to help me cut out, assemble, and distribute the bunnies at dawn on Easter morning - we returned to the tradition of bunnying, now doing every house on either side of the street on our section of the block, fourteen houses total. Each lawn was allotted 14 bunnies, so that came to a total of 196 bunnies, though I usually made a several more batches of bunnies to surprise friends who lived beyond our neighborhood. Hence we usually ended up assembling and then distributing in the wee hours of Easter morning around 266 or so bunnies.
I kept up the tradition of Easter bunnying after my own children were grown and gone, though in recent years the tradition lapsed again because for the past half-dozen years or so we'd spent Easter in Los Angeles with our grandchildren.
On Friday night Theresa and I cut out the bunnies from construction paper, 210 total,