Paper Peter Rabbits

The trees are a riot of color as I drive past the grounds of the Episcopal Church in my town. The field that becomes the annual pumpkin patch worthy of inclusion in a Peanuts special is heartbreakingly bare. Every fall since I moved to this New England town over twenty years ago, the arrival of the pumpkins has been a seasonal passage. When my children were young, my husband and I would try to stage the perfect autumnal photo of our cherubs among the field of orange orbs. My now-teenage son is one of the assembly line volunteers who help unload the gourds to support the Navajo community that the church sponsors.

COVID has ruined everything this year, even pumpkin patches. The church decided that creating the patch and holding the sale of pumpkins was too risky. Instead they devised a plan to sell wooden pumpkins on sticks that people could buy and decorate. The decorated pumpkins will be returned to the church and to create an imitation patch.

This is 2020.

I am reminded of the “Peter Rabbit Debacle Weekend” in our family. My son was a toddler at the time. He had a stuffed Peter Rabbit that he creatively named “Bunny.” He couldn’t go anywhere without Bunny, especially to sleep. One weekend, we were taking off to visit my parents in New Jersey. Our departure was a rushed affair because my husband needed to arrive in time to take an important conference call. About an hour into the drive, my son called out from his car seat in the back that he wanted Bunny.

I looked at my husband. “You grabbed Bunny off the counter, didn’t you?” I tried to mask the panic in my voice, a trick most parents learn to master, but one that eluded me.

“I thought you did.” Was his equally panicked answer.

“We have to go back.” I lowered my voice to a whisper.

“We can’t. I have to be able to be on that call by two.”

“What’re we going to do?”

“He’ll be fine, right?” My husband tried to reassure himself as much as me.

Our son was anything but fine. Already cranky because he’d missed his afternoon nap, he was inconsolable when he learned that Bunny was in Connecticut and not in New Jersey with us.

I called every baby boutique in a twenty-five-mile radius of my mom’s house to find a substitute Bunny, much like I had “replaced” an unexpected dead goldfish a few weeks ago. But no luck. I was told by one salesperson, “Peter Rabbit is not really ‘in’ with children anymore.” Well, Peter Rabbit was definitely “in” for my kid. We were looking at a very tearful, and probably sleepless, weekend.

At one point, my son climbed into my lap and saw the exact replica of Bunny on my laptop. I had found it on Amazon and could’ve had it shipped, but by the time it would arrive, we would already be back home with the original Peter Rabbit. 

“Bunny!” he whimpered. “Bunny!” He thrust his little arms toward the screen.

So, in desperation, I printed out a color copy of the stuffed toy. In what could be considered a feat of amazingly creative parenting or one of my embarrassing lows, I let my son go to sleep with the paper image. His self-soothing technique was to rub his Bunny’s paw or soft ear on his face, so I was terrified he would wake up with a hundred paper cuts. Thankfully, he woke up the next morning with unblemished cheeks and the rest of the weekend passed uneventfully. He carried the paper bunny with him everywhere we went, so by Sunday it was a bit wrinkled and stained. But he made it through. We arrived home and the reunion with the real Bunny was sweet and joyful.

All this brings me back to the wooden pumpkins. I feel like 2020 has been a year of printed out pictures of a stuffed bunny. We hold meetings with colleagues and teachers via Zoom. We host happy hours on FaceTime. We celebrate events like graduations and weddings from all corners of the world in our nice tops and ratty pajama bottoms. We drive by and honk for people’s birthdays. We have a field of wooden pumpkins on stakes that we admire from afar. We can’t have the real things, so we find substitutes. It’s not the same—even my three-year-old knew that wasn’t really Bunny—but we’re making the best of it. We need to hunker down and hold on to our paper Peter Rabbits, whatever they may be, until that time that we can put our arms around the real thing. And when we do, it will be a sweet and joyful reunion.

-Julia Bruce

Julia Bruce lives in Connecticut with her husband, two children, and her rescue dog. She is a freelance writer for several local magazines and online news publications. She often composes her stories and thoughts while on long runs near the horse farms scattered around her neighborhood.