Bunny Prints

I woke up at 4am to my son standing in my bedroom doorway holding paint and brushes. He’s eighteen, hasn’t lived here in two years, and we barely speak anymore after everything that happened with his dad. But there he was in the dark saying “I need to borrow your stencils.”

My father in law died in July. The man who spent every Easter morning since before my kids were born painting little bunny footprints on every sidewalk in the neighborhood, leading to every house with children. He’d get up at dawn with his spray paint and stencils and spend hours making magic for kids he’d never met. People would bring their toddlers out in pajamas to follow the trail. It was the one pure thing in this town.

This year nobody expected the prints. We buried him in August and I figured that tradition died with him. My son hasn’t been home since the funeral. We don’t talk about his grandfather, we don’t talk about the divorce, we don’t talk about why he moved out the day he turned eighteen. There’s too much broken between us.

But he showed up in my doorway before sunrise asking for stencils. I didn’t ask questions. I just went to my craft room where I keep supplies for the custom stencil work I sell through my Tedooo app shop and pulled out everything I had. Bunny prints in three sizes, the exact ones his grandfather used. My son took them without looking at me and left.

I got dressed and followed him in my car. Watched him spend four hours in the cold painting every sidewalk his grandfather used to paint, crying the whole time, making sure every house with kids got their Easter bunny trail. He was finishing the last house when the sun came up and this little girl in princess pajamas came running out screaming that the Easter bunny came to her house. My son just nodded at her and kept painting.

When he got back to his car I was standing there. He looked at me with his grandfather’s eyes and said “I couldn’t let them down.” We stood in the street and cried together for the first time in two years. I asked if he wanted breakfast and he said yes.

I ordered a custom memorial stencil through the Tedooo app later that week, his grandfather’s name in bunny prints. We’re going to paint it at the start of every trail next year. Both of us. Some things don’t die just because people do. My son taught me that at 4am on a cold sidewalk, keeping a promise for a man who’s gone.

~Credit to respective owner