2023-08-23 16:57:39
We didn’t always go away on vacation. Sometimes the garden behind the house had to do, at least for a few weeks. My sister, Dieter Koch from the house next door and I passed the time building a house on the lawn out of the huge cardboard boxes in which new gas stoves were delivered to my father’s business. It kept getting bigger, had more and more rooms, even if you could only reach them on all fours, and more and more material from our children’s room found its way there: dolls, doll beds, doll clothes and so on. We were probably playing father, mother, child. extended family!
The cardboard house soon covered the entire lawn, there was no longer room for my mother’s deck chair, a summer downpour caused the walls to buckle and the ceilings to sag. A slum in the backyard of Heidelberg-Neuenheim. Today you can no longer imagine that in this area that has become noble.
Early one evening, when my father’s workshop was already closed, we children saw through the door a moving sack. We also thought we could see a red glow through the coarse jute. Persistent drilling at the dinner table revealed: Inside the sack was a rabbit that was going to be our Sunday roast. A slap in the neck, performed by Egon, one of my father’s employees, should prepare it for this. My father wouldn’t have had the heart to do something like that himself.
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Schnucki was an albino, our self-rescued pet
Back then – it was the early 1970s in West Germany – nobody was vegetarian, let alone vegan. I was happy to accompany my mother to the Blatt butcher’s shop and took a piece of Ring Lyoner from the friendly saleswoman. But now the howling was great.
My parents offered us a compromise, or was it blackmail? We would demolish the dwelling in the garden and save the rabbit’s life. That’s how it happened. Out of the sack came Schnucki, a red-eyed albino, our self-rescued pet, who was housed in a stable in the corner of the garden my grandpa was building. We planted dandelion beds for Schnucki in the deserted neighboring garden, and then the summer holidays were over. Autumn came, the dark, cold winter came, and we sometimes forgot Schnucki for days. I still remember the fear that the animal that owed us its life might have starved to death when I finally sneaked up to it in the evening.
#save #rabbits #life