Honeysuckle drags a ribbon

So. Honeysuckle's been up to some shady shenanigans around here. And it's time to go public with them.

About 16 days ago Anita took her back to the farm of her birth to meet a suitor. All this was carefully planned and officially approved. Mary Lou, the breeder and owner of a herd of angora rabbits, has four bucks and one of them was introduced to Honeysuckle, who promptly tried to beat him up. Same thing for the next in line. Her response: face him at all times, box his head with front paws if he tries any tricks (ha), and run as far away as my little cage allows.

What was going on in her little bunny brain? We speculated, how could a rabbit not be interested in romance and motherhood? She is a year old and could have been bred six months ago. Fyi, rabbits ovulate anytime they’re bred which explains their ability to make hundreds of babies while you make one. Gestation is 30 days. Litter size anywhere from four to twelve.

Mary Lou left her in a cage overnight with the gentlest of all her guys. A Dutch Agoudi, gray in color with little splashes of white and gray on his face. Nothing happened as far as anyone knew. When Anita brought her home she looked disheveled and crabby. It took a few days for her to forget her trauma and dash about like her normal spoiled self.

This morning when I looked on the back porch she was trying to pull a four foot hot pink ribbon off a wedding wreath. We had big doings around here this past weekend with Kosmo getting married and all. Intrigued, I watched as she laboriously wadded it into her mouth and carried it to her hutch where she deposited it in her litter box. Turns out rabbit mothers like to make multiple uses of their litter box. Then she tried to drag my heavy old wool “welcome” rug across to her hutch and when I pulled strings out of her mouth she was extremely annoyed and let me know I should get off it. I know she thinks of it as her property and has already chewed the crap out of it, making it nearly useless. A while back I trimmed off a portion and Anita put it in her hutch where it gives off a distinctly French brothel look. We’re thinking of hanging a gilded mirror, too, since she spends a good deal of her time preening.

I began to wonder, hmmm. I called Anita to watch. We brought her a couple of rags and sure enough, she dragged them into the hutch and rasseled them around some more. This looks like nesting behavior. Perhaps more happened out at the farm than we knew. Ah, the excitement. I choose not to think of what Anita will do with a litter of angoras. She says she will sell or give them away. (I don’t think we or our porch can withstand much more sustained cuteness.) She’s looking at plans for building a nest box. And two weeks from now, since the exact date is unknown, Honeysuckle should begin pulling her wool to line a nest and that will be a sure sign, baby bunnies are arriving.

Now that you’ve wasted perfectly good time reading this post, I will be sure to let you know the outcome. I'm quiet certain some of you need an angora rabbit to complete your life.

Anita’s Bio

This went up on Ransom Fellowship’s website today and I thought there might be a few folks out there who’d be interested. For the past two years, Anita has been a good part of our life as a housemate and friend. Now it’s official: She is Ransom’s Resident Assistant. A newly minted position:

Anita Gorder has been living in Mole’s End, the small flat at the back of Toad Hall for a while now. Long enough for all of us to get to know each other well. It’s been only gradually that Denis and I, and now our Board of Directors, have come to see how uniquely qualified Anita was for becoming our assistant. (We always knew we liked her, nay, loved her.) Having her at this stage of our ministry and life is truly providential and something only God could have planned. Her being here allows us to concentrate more fully on such things as writing.

Anita is a native of Seattle, WA, but spent a few years getting her college education in Alaska, and working summers at an island salmon factory where bear alerts were common and the smell of fish stuck to the hair twenty-four-seven was not enough to diminish her love of eating her favorite wild salmon: The King.

Along the way she visited Swiss L’Abri, eventually ending up at Rochester L’Abri as a helper. With her interest in gardening and landscape, we hired her to re-do our flower beds. That was the beginning. We learned she had a special interest and talent for creating beauty in many mediums from iron-works to jewelry making. But her favorite, by far, is fiber art – creating things that range from practical to whimsical. From sheep shearing to spinning and yarn dying, we’ve not only learned, we’ve been entertained by silk worms spinning, alpaca fleeces, and especially by her angora rabbit, Honeysuckle, who lives on our back porch and grows the finest white wool I’ve ever collected on my black coat. It loves to gather in my armpits, for some weird reason. Of my coat, you fool. She’s always doing something fascinating, this week it was baking silk worm cocoons to kill the pupa before she harvested the fibers. Bleh.

 Holding Honeysuckle.

 Visiting The Yarn Garage

Anita’s quiet, warm hospitality, her humor, hard work, her ability to cook the crap out of any recipe, work on our web site, do research, help outdoors, and put up with us, is so perfect I could cry. So what do we or Ransom do for her? Well, Ransom has given her a salaried position that is not quite full-time. And in exchange for rent from us she is responsible for the yard and does mostly whatever pleases her in the garden. Altogether it is full-time work. Thanks be to God for riches so graciously shared with us.