Column: Rosalie Albers, Washington Avenue

The tiny 4-year-old girl with long, red curls played busily on the green hill of her grandmother’s lawn. She did not have a real playhouse. Instead, nestled snuggly among her grandmother’s flowering shrub garden of purple and white lilacs, snowballs and yellow forsythia, was a tent made out of Pioneer Seed Corn canvas bags, sewed together by her mother.

On this warm summer day on a rural southern Minnesota farm, the child quietly entertained herself in this safe haven. She was not aware, as children seldom are, that she was being observed by her grandmother’s cousin visiting from North Dakota through the dining room window. Soon the girl disappeared into her makeshift playhouse with its wooden peach crate for a table, a couple wooden children’s chairs, a tin tea set, a doll in her mother’s wicker doll buggy and the blue rabbit that was almost as big as she was and probably won for her by her uncle at a carnival.

Suddenly the visitor burst into laughter, so much so that the girl’s mother and grandmother came from the kitchen to see what was making her laugh so joyfully. Apparently the blue rabbit had been very bad inside the small retreat, for suddenly he was flying out of the tent head over heels, where he landed in the grass and lay ignored for a while. Eventually the little girl came out, picked him up and put him over her knee and gave him a good spanking. She then took him back inside the tent, the rabbit apparently forgiven for whatever he had done.

Now I do not remember this incident and barely remember the blue rabbit. Why I would have spanked him that way I have no idea, because I was never spanked like that. Maybe an occasional swat on the back side was all that was needed to get the point across. This was a story my grandmother loved to tell, and I am sure she and her cousin shared many a good chuckle at the blue rabbit’s expense.

Bricelyn resident Rosalie Albers is a member of the Washington Avenue Writers Group. The group’s column appears monthly.