You Tell Me...

I have no idea how this happened. Had there been a camcorder set up in the house---just some interior surveillance equipment---we would all know. But we do not know. We cannot know. Yet, there has to be an explanation. A good one.

Last night I pulled into the carport after a very difficult 12 hour shift and the 18.2 mile drive out to the homestead. The sun had not yet set. The scorching heat of the whopping 87 (or so) degree day had begun to subside hours prior. It felt good to be home.

With a slam of the door to the Ford Exploder, I balanced my mail, my coffee mug, my keys, my camera. I ascended the seven steps to the back deck. And then I saw it.

You know how when something really out of place happens and your brain has to go somewhere within its experience to make sense out of something it has never reckoned with before? Yeah, that.

My first thought was that there was now a white lace curtain draped across the double pane sliding glass door. Who could have put that there? Not satisfied with this translation, my eyes continued to marshal data to my brain, but without any interpretation of what lay before them; something had been bizzarely altered. The entire door had been shattered and thousands of crazed avenues of refracted light spat out the beautiful contortions of a patterned report about a single, mysterious moment of chaos that had taken place when the tree fell in the woods and no one was there to hear it.

"All dressed up," and thinking possibly burglary in progress, I withdrew my sidearm and mini flashlight from their holstered perch on my utility belt. Very slowly, I opened the slider until I could see into my family room, just off the deck. The Bushnells I used the day before to determine if the deer in the yard was a doe or a buck lay inches from the door. I could see my old unstrung classical guitar---propped against the stereo speaker when I left for work in the morning---now lying on the carpet. Beyond the binocs, and just in front of the TV, was the displaced magnetic disk normally housed in the base of a magmount radio antenna. Beyond that, in the kitchen, were the shoes Cindra found for me at Goodwill two years ago. I had placed them the day before, shoulder to shoulder and neatly ready for my next slide into them after the work week. Now they looked like Sasquatch had tried them on, taken one step, and then dismounted from them where they now mocked me from their new configuration. Beyond the shoes, and under the dining room table, was my Yaesu FT-2500M 2 meter Ham radio with the 30 inch whip magnetic mount antenna still attached by the feed line. For those who don't savvy radio lingo, that's a cord.

And then just beyond the dining room table, in the little entry way, lay the explanation to what had happened. Oh---and did I mention I have a cat? Her name is Carmela.

I holstered my weapon and clicked off the flashlight.

But here's the big question: How did a wild baby bunny get into the house? The doors were secured. No windows were left open, save those with screens in place.

Apart from the as yet unsolved mystery of how the bunny got inside my house, this is what I have pieced together: First, the bunny was in the house. Second, Carmela saw the bunny in the house. Third, Carmela advanced on the bunny and the chase was on. During this chase, Carmela somehow interacted with the radio equipment. I am going to assume that she was under the computer table upon which rested that radio and from which dangled its many wires (power cord, linear amplifier cord, antenna cord--or to you who know radio lingo--the feed line). When she bolted for the bunny, she ran right through wires and caught them by her legs and or shoulders and then pulled the works along with the momentum of her hunt. The radio pulled the antenna, the antenna pulled the binoculars right smack into, and shattering, the window. Caught in the feed line to the antenna, Carmela panicked and then, tearing through the house, the magnet fell from its base.

There was no blood. No fur. Just disarray and a shattered 32X78 inch sheet of glass.

So, you tell me: How did the bunny get into the house?

Oh, and that deer the other morning. It was a doe. Fat with fawn. And yes, I am now really afraid...






















You have to admire Carmela's feigned feline insouciance. As if with a shrug she ever-so-cautiously approaches the guitar as if to say: "Hey, look at this. This is strange. I wonder what happened here."