First thing

Morning on the balcony the other day, and the first thing I noticed was that a fellow had gone through the break in the fence and was digging around in the scrabbly dirt.

For a couple of summers now, as the site sits empty, we’ve fantasized about and throwing sunflower seeds or wildflower seeds in there to get a field of colour rather than the bleak dust of it, but I think the truth of the matter is there’s more pebble than soil, as even the weeds that have started to grow here and there around the edges only get so far.

So I wondered what exactly was he up to in there? I imagined a scientist taking soil samples to measure quality, or toxicity levels, something…

And then he stood and went towards a pile of random junk against the fence, and a bunny rabbit shot out from somewhere inside the stacked stuff, and froze.

If I don’t move, you can’t see me.

He’s a tiny dot there, to the right of the man, by the first bend in the fence. I went inside to get my DSLR, but alas all batteries were dead, so I was stuck with only the phone camera, waiting to see what would happen next.

Well, not so much, it turned out.

After some moments of observing the bunny from where he stood, the man slowly went back to scrabbling around in the dirt, and the bunny stayed frozen in his spot. They each did their thing without interfering with the other.

It made me think of some drawings I’d been working on recently, based on bunnies in the neighbourhood, and / or the idea that bunnies live in this ultra-urban neighbourhood and how stressful it must be for them, the highway, the cars, the bikes and scooters, the rotating base camp across the street.

How often are they in the if I don’t move, you can’t see me response?

Lens Artists Challenge – The First Thing I Thought Of