I love this picture of me and my brother. We lived so carefree back then and so loved to play in our backyard. We especially loved those bunnies. So did our dog, LuLu. See her in the top corner of the photo? If the bunnies were in the yard pen we had to be with them for their own safety. The bunnies also had safer pens in the garage but we tried to get them out to play in the grass a little bit each day as they were first growing.

The momma bunny Stark (as in white), was our first rabbit. Three weeks after we got her as an Easter gift from our father she had 10 babies. Our father was not happy about this development in our collective pet career. As soon as we could find homes my father insisted we start giving those bunnies away. Gone first were Benny, Tippy, Tiny, Sunny, then gone were Peter and the rest over time.

Not long after her babies were gone my brother started training Stark. That bunny was very smart and eventually we could call her to the door of her cage when we wanted to her to play. For reasons our mother never understood, my brother trained Stark to hold still on command like she was a stuffed rabbit. She wouldn’t do it for long but long enough for my mother to say, “Oh, you two stop that! Why would you want to make it look like she was dead?” We would belly laugh and she would wave us away with her right hand while her left hand rested on her hip and she hid a laugh to boot!

Stark lived for 6 more years and didn’t have any other babies, not that mother and father would let us have another rabbit well, after that 10 baby bunny fiasco or as my father would say, “A regrettable purchase.” The hours I played with my brother on those summer days and school afternoons with our animals are the sweetest memories I have from my childhood.

He became the same kind of grown up person as he was as my young brother; kind. What was the way I repaid him for his kindness to me in our childhood? Last Easter I gave his kids a perfectly beautiful white rabbit named George, except for one tiny little secret. George was pregnant.

Written by Julia Roberts, Kidneys and Eyes