JOY ALONG THE WAY: SHIFTING SCENERY ALONG WAY

Like Maeterlinck's Blue Bird of Happiness, I have found much joy along the way in my own back yard where the crickets fiddle, the rabbits play, the hollyhocks soar and the butterflies flutter.

Any time of the day -- when the dew sprinkles diamonds in the grass, when the sun stands at nigh noon, when, at twilight the birds begin to sing their muted vespers -- there is an unrolling tapestry of life for me to participate in or just sit back and enjoy. I can dream my own dreams, spin my on fantasies, think my own thoughts, shift my own scenery by mentally transporting my surroundings to any Kubla Kahn stately pleasure dome, falling down any rabbit hole of wonderland, soaring upward as did poet Magee until I can "put out my hand and touch the face of God."

For instance: At that magic time "between the dark and the daylight," I sat and watched the rabbits come out to play. There are three of them this summer. At least that's as many as I've seen at any one time.

Where Sunny Hill planted the new Bradford pear, the workers mounded up a ring of wood shavings around the base. There is something in this ring that the rabbits like. The soft texture to their feet? The odor of the shavings?

The rabbits like to run around the top of that ring. Round and round they go, like some rabbit carousel.

One rabbit is bigger than the others and moves faster. I perceived that it was disturbing the rhythm of the other two, until he learned to leap over them in an Evel Knievel fashion, thus making two round trips to the others' one.

Suddenly the big rabbit stops and the other two run into him. They brush the wood shavings from their whiskers, twitch their cotton tails and look at Mr. Big as if to say, "What's up, Doc?"

What's up is that a late-flying bird has landed on the rim of the bird bath. An owl? No, they never come to the bird bath. A whippoorwill? I wish. I can see by a shaft of dim light coming from somewhere that it is the resident flicker. But wait! A flicker doesn't belong in the same setting with Doc Rabbit. It is Woody Woodpecker. How nice of it to come into the moving fantasy picture.

Sensing no threat, the rabbits continue their running game, but stop short again. This time there is, indistinct in the twilight, a four-footed creature coming down the nearby walk. Probably Bootsy the pretty cat, but immersed in Merry Melodies Land, I make it out to be Porky Pig. In no hurry is Porky. He lies down on the walk, stretched out like some huge wooly worm, trying to disguise himself.

Big Rabbit, M.D., crouches low, the little rabbits even lower. Flicker, alias Woody Woodpecker, flies away to safer climes. Porky inches forward on his stomach. Ever see a pig crawl? When he is within 10 feet of the rabbit carousel, the rabbits disappear like little brown streaks of lightning.

Bootsy, alias Porky Pig, stands erect and says, at least, I think I hear him say, "Tha, tha, tha, that's all, folks."

They all go away and I emerge from my fantasy land into reality, but l echo Porky. "Tha, tha, tha, that's all, folks. At least for now. Shift of scenery coming up. Stay tuned."

REJOICE! AND KEEP HAVING JOY ALONG THE WAY!

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime columnist for the Southeast Missourian.