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When we were kids, my brother and I spent time with our grandparents at their home in Delaware. My brother always favored small furry animals and decided he wanted a rabbit. If he got a rabbit -- he got all the good stuff, of course, and first-- I had to have a rabbit. So on the way back to New York, we stopped at the home of one of the Amish families we knew and we each, naively, picked out a rabbit because we liked their colors. I got a completely white rabbit. He got one that was black and white. He thought my rabbit was trite. I thought his rabbit had to be better because it was, you know, his. Man, it sucks being the little sister.
But I digress. . . oh yes, the rabbits.
Not surprisingly, once we were home, we started having quite a lot of rabbits. So much so, that my parents said we had to give back the rabbits.

Very sad.

Except that -- o! frabjous day! -- we happened to return the rabbits on a day when the Amish boys had been hunting and had killed what turned out to be a mother raccoon. They had tracked back to the nest and taken the kits. Six baby raccoons. So we traded. What a deal. A measly two rabbits for SIX, count 'em SIX, baby raccoons. So adorable they are with their clever hands and those cunning masks. We brought them home in a cardboard box.

Can we keep these? Not in the house, my father said. So we built an enclosure in the yard and kept them there for a while. How long a while I don't quite remember, but long enough for me to take one to school for show-and-tell, and for my mother to make a baseball jacket for another that we took to my brother's Little League games. A friend of one of my aunts adopted one of the raccoons, and the other five eventually made a break for freedom and moved into the park across the street.

A few decades later, there are still raccoons in the park and I can't help wondering -- did I do that?

image from http://www.loomcom.com/raccoons/gallery/jpegs/raccoon1.jpg