It turned out that Aunt Eloise had been saving The Ugly Blue Bunny for me. When Meg and I were in second grade, our teacher had assigned a project to the class of making a gift for our parents out of clay. It could be anything we wanted it to be, so I immediately envisioned a work that I had seen on a trip to the De Young Museum with my mother: an elegant Ming Dynasty vase decorated with a tiny pattern of stylized, indigo leaves on a cream-colored background, finished with an ancient, crackly raku glaze. This was what I wanted to make. And I could see it so clearly in my mind, too, its sleek, smooth sides with their subtle swell, the deft artwork of the design. But of course, there was no way in the world that a second-grader, no matter how precocious, could make a replica of a Ming Dynasty vase.

    This did not stop me from trying, however. I worked and worked, spent my recess time on it, tried to convince the teacher to let me stay after school. She couldn’t do that, of course. And in the end, in a panic, when everyone else had at least made something and I hadn’t, I squeezed together a lumpy, misshapen bunny, its body the shape of a turd, its head and tail grimy little balls of about the same size, the ears two fat slugs. I had painted it with a blue glaze and fired it up with my classmates’ efforts. When it came back to me, the reality was so far from my vision that I laid my head down on my desk and wept silently for the rest of the day.

    Meg had the same second grade teacher that I did and when she saw how unhappy I was, she felt terrible. She had ended up making one of those delightful artful accidents that characterizes much of children’s art, a little pinch-pot that had all kinds of plump, jaunty personality. So after school, on our walk home, she told me that she loved my blue bunny, thought it was wonderful, and that we should trade—she would give my bunny to her parents and I would give her pinch-pot to mine. Even at age seven, she was insightful enough to know that parents would love anything handmade by their children. But I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t take credit for Meg’s work, even at age seven. So next she hit upon the idea to go to one of those retail ceramic shops where you can use one of their pre-formed pots and paint a design on it, then fire it up with other customers’ pieces. Aunt Eloise took us there one day after school, Meg having filled her in on my distress. I came up with something that made me feel better, and that was what I gave to my parents, a stocky little vase daubed with much larger flowers than the ones composing the design for the Ming Dynasty vessel.

    Soon after that, I threw the blue bunny into the trash with a certain amount of bitterness toward it for failing me so utterly. Not to mention being so turd-like and lumpy and just downright ugly. I even threw it into the “big” trash, one of the outside trash barrels, to make sure that it would get whisked away as soon as possible. But Meg had been spying on me from our bedroom when I did this, unbeknownst to me. And as soon as I went back inside, she slipped out and rescued The Ugly Blue Bunny, hid it away in one of the drawers of her bureau.

     Eight years later, rooting around for a T-shirt to borrow, I discovered it. Meg was in the room with me—we were getting ready to go on a hike with Uncle Carey—when I pulled it out of its hiding place. I held it up between my thumb and forefinger to show it to her. She stared at it—a completely unreadable expression on her face—then me. Neither of us spoke for a moment, but as the unmistakable turdiness of the bunny’s body began to sink in, we started snickering, which quickly escalated into helpless, convulsive, adolescent girl laughter. We collapsed on the floor, giggling like hyenas, Meg gasping, “Put it away! Put it away!”

     After that, the bunny began to wander. It began to lurk. One never knew where one might find The Ugly Blue Bunny … in the toaster oven, in the soap dish in the guest bathroom, in the drawer in the den where we kept all the remotes. Everyone in the Gardiner household must have been in on the game by the time Meg and I left for college. And when Aunt Eloise decided to hire someone to clean the house, she managed to get the cleaning lady involved in it, too. I’ll bet you that if there was a fire in the house, the one thing that everyone would have had the presence of mind to snatch would have been The Ugly Blue Bunny—if they knew where it was lurking, that is.  

     When I saw what Aunt Eloise wanted to give me, I protested, worried that my taking it would end a cherished family tradition. What would the place be like without The Ugly Blue Bunny lying in wait where you least expected it, to startle you when you opened the medicine cabinet or poke into your butt when you sat down on the sofa? But Uncle Carey told me it was time for new traditions. And he said that he thought The Ugly Blue Bunny was ready to expand his horizons, see more of the world. His anthropomorphism tickled me in an effervescent, yet oddly painful way and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to laugh or start crying. At any rate, I took the bunny, once again feeling an unfamiliar twinge of empathy for my little girl self, nurturing such impossible expectations that were bound to be dashed.