Peter Rabbit's Redemption and the Blackout Crucifix

Life can be a lot like Mr. McGregor’s garden – ripe with seductive treasures, baited with hard lessons to learn.

Like the characters in Toy Story, the mementos on top of my bureau rearrange themselves during the night when I’m not looking. I swear! I wake up and objects and photographs once scattered across the worn white linen bureau scarf have curated themselves, some grouping together in solidarity, others standing alone or in pairs, all assuming roles in an ongoing story I don’t fully comprehend. I know it’s the story of what I hold dear and how I have lived. I know that it’s a very good story. I think it will ultimately have a happy ending. But there are still pieces to connect, things I’ve missed — and my bureau is a shifting diorama designed to show me, like Dickens’ ghosts, what might have been, what is, and what could still be.

This morning, a new reveal. I looked down and chuckled.

Perhaps because I was viewing the world through Easter glasses, I noticed that my iron crucifix – the one I ordered from the Sundance catalogue in a web-surfing blackout a few months before my last drink in 2006, the one that shook me to the bone when it arrived, since I hadn’t remembered ordering it — was snuggled up with my bowl of sobriety anniversary coins – and tipping against a little stack of Beatrix Potter books that I’ve carried around with me since childhood. On top of the stack was The Tale of Peter Rabbit.