(No bunnies here. Just a nice view this week, on the walk home after work.)

Each morning, the alarm in their bedroom rang Ding! then with a polite pause Ding Ding! then with another polite pause really warming up with jazzy bright chimes in a doot-doot-de-doo rhythm. A fast online search turned up a picture that looks like theirs — a Westclox Big Ben Chime Alarm. Memory is a curious thing; I had no visual recall of that clock, but spotted it right away just now in a whole page of vintage models.

Every morning, when they turned off the alarm, Grandma’s voice would say to Grandpa “4:30 already! Goodness. After you retire, I’m going to sleep late until 6:00 every morning of the week. What a shame to wake up the little one in there.”

The little one though was up & at ’em, wildly excited to be visiting Gram & Grandpa, with the amazing novelty of being awake in the pitch dark and cold. Soon Grandpa and I were down at the table in the chilly kitchen by the warm gas stove, me on my foot stool for extra height, bundled up warm with an extra pair Gram’s woolly knee socks. Gram whipped up sausage patties, perfect round poached eggs, toast, and sometimes (my favorite) mashed potatoes fried crisp in butter, and delicious oatmeal cooked in milk. I got to eat it all up with a special tiny child spoon of real silver, and drink out of a special glass with a beautiful red Kentucky Cardinal painted on the outside. Every morning I looked at its red and black colors and jaunty crest, wishing I could go to Kentucky and see a real Cardinal, because we all knew New York is too cold to ever have any. (The first time I saw a bird outside that matched the bird on the glass, I burst hollering into the house to tell Gram to come running and see.)

Grandpa was silent at breakfast, and silent in general. He worked every day except Sunday from 6:00 in the morning to 6:00 at night at the family business, generally in the bitter cold. For the coldest days and snow, as outdoor clothes he put on just a quilted vest and a black and white hunting hat with ear flaps, made of hounds’-tooth pattern wool. I never once saw him wear a coat or scarf or gloves. Mornings we left the house at 5:30 or so, crunching through snow under the moon to the car. Grandma put me in the back seat and always said “Where’s your HANDS?” and I had to hold them straight up where she could see them so she knew it was safe to close the back door without hurting me. Then she drove very slowly all the way down the hill to town, to drop off Grandpa for the workday, and he got out of the car with a roast-beef sandwich in brown paper to tide him over until supper.

After work we picked him up. In careful stiff stages he eased in to the car after his long day. If my cousins were in the car, and if it wasn’t too close to supper to spoil our appetites, sometimes Gram opened the glove compartment up front and took out her supply of Black Jack gum for us to chew on. (In Wikipedia I just looked up Black Jack gum. By golly, that was really a thing — a licorice formula confection since 1884, the first flavored gum in the US and the first gum available in sticks. The licorice (pronounced lick-rish) flavor was completely strange to us, but we chewed it anyway. Then while Gram drove the car we kids took the gum wrappers and very carefully speared them on the long pearl pin that Gram always wore with her hairbun. We thought she might enjoy the fun of having gum wrappers falling all over when she walked into the grocery store or took off her hat.)

Back at home, Grandpa sat down on the foot stool while Grandma unfastened his high boots, working the laces free of the metal hooks from toe to top. His hands couldn’t handle small things like bootlace knots, after getting frostbit in World War I. I didn’t understand then how come if the War was more than 40 years ago, why didn’t the frostbite melt away by now? But Grandma said that’s how it goes with frostbite, and that’s why girls have to put on mittens and warm socks for outdoors. After easing his feet into fresh wool socks and slippers, Gran gave him a cup of hot tea to hold and then opened the freezer and took out a package of pure white goose-grease from the butcher, and she rubbed it on his hands to help them warm up for the night. Then he would sharpen his straight razor on a long leather strop, shave with a little mirror on the wall, watch a few minutes of TV news over a very light supper (small patty of round steak chopped, three spoonfuls of cooked spinach, three prunes for dessert). Then he said “Nacht Nacht” to all and climbed the stairs to bed.

But before work, in their half hour of pre-dawn free time, my grandparents went searching for bunnies.

Bunny watching was for short days and long winter nights, before the sun came up, when roads were empty and creatures were still out and prowling. Gram went a little bit out of their way, on the beach road looking out over Long Island Sound. At that hour there was not a car in sight; we had the woods and shore to ourselves. The car cruised at a gentle little pace, avoiding any signs of ice, taking its time. In the dark forest the stars trailed right along, hiding and seeking through the tops of the trees and over the horizon with its twinkling lights from the city.

We watched out both sides of the car with close attention. Gram always managed to spot them first. Bunnies! They dashed along the road with white cotton tails high, and sometimes right across, lucky to be seen by the slowest careful driver. Sometimes it was squirrels. Or mallard ducks. Or a cat with shining eyes. One time a real raccoon! Climbing out of a storm drain! And once it was a ringneck pheasant, with a great flapping soar of surprise and flashes of color and elegant tail. I kept breathing on the windows and rubbing off the frost with my mitten to see everything, and trying to trace the animals on the window so I could have a lifelike shape on the frosty glass to look at later. But the animals were all too fast for me, so mainly I did a lot of bouncing in the back seat trying not to yell and scare the creatures. It was just so amazing and great to see real nature animals that weren’t on TV.

Tonight for Catholic Holy Week, looking for an Easter memory to capture here, what came to mind somehow was bunnies. After growing up, and growing older now than those grandparents were then, it’s easy to see: the point of looking for bunnies was not scoring bunnies. It’s about two greatest-generation Germans born in the 1800s, weathering hardships and heartaches that they were not about to mention to us and that we can never fathom, saving string in a ball and bacon drippings in a jar and keeping a scrubbed warm well-fed home for the grandkiddos to visit and mess up and holler in.

Bunny watching was their one light enjoyable tradition of leisure; traveling in silence, side by side down the years, watching for the frozen dark to yield some sweet surprise along the road.