📅 Saturday, 26 September 2026 · No. 175

How Many Years? Playing With House Money at Ten

📓 My Tracker · ✎ 4 min · by Azmi in Meknes

Azmi's note My personal log from Meknes, not vet advice. Just what I did and saw tonight.

I am Azmi, writing from Meknes, and my shadow asked me the big question tonight. Not in words, obviously. She asked it by climbing into my lap at ten years old, settling her grey-muzzled chin against my wrist, and breathing slow while I did the maths I have been avoiding: how many years does a rabbit get? Past ten, every day feels like house money, every morning a bonus round. So tonight I opened the ledger and did the accounting, with her asleep beside me while I wrote.

On the credit side, the long houses. I keep a mental ledger of every elder rabbit I have ever heard of from keepers I trust: fourteen years in one house, twelve in another, twelve and still going in a third, each story arriving with photographs of silver-faced seniors loafing in sunbeams. These are not statistics, they are lanterns. They tell me what is possible when luck and care align. Giants tend to have fewer years, the small ones sometimes stretch further, and individual fate scrambles every pattern, but the ledger proves the upper entries exist. Someone’s rabbit made fourteen. Fourteen is written down. That counts.

Debits, honestly entered

On the debit side, honestly entered, the short stories. One beloved rabbit gone at four to genes nobody could have outrun. The friend whose six-year-old faded in a single season. My own scares over the years, the nights of sitting up watching a quiet hutch, the clinic dashes that ended well but shaved years off my own life. Luck matters enormously and care matters more, but neither is a contract. The ledger balances only if I write both columns, and tonight I wrote them all, the fourteen and the four, the twelve-and-going and the gone-too-soon, until the page held the full honest range of what rabbit years can be.

Health streaks decide more than calendars, I have come to believe. The rabbits in my ledger who ran long shared no single breed or diet secret; they shared unbroken stretches of ordinary good days, one after another, year after year, the compounding interest of uneventful time. My own contribution to that compounding is routine and attention: steady hay and fresh greens, clean housing, watchful eyes, and a veterinarian I consult early and often. That is not medical advice for anyone else, only my household policy. Every health question in this house goes to the clinic, because ten years of experience has taught me exactly how much I do not know. The professionals hold the medical column. I hold the observation column, and I keep it carefully.

How I count the interest

The counting itself has become my favourite practice. Every year photographed like the first: the same corner, the same light, the same loaf, so the changes arrive gradually enough to love instead of all at once to grieve. My habit of lining up old and recent pictures side by side began years ago, back when I started comparing the same bunny nine years apart as a photo habit, and the ten-year edition of that comparison is now my most treasured file. The muzzle whiter, the eyes softer, the loaf lower and longer. Same bunny. Same light. More story.

And the diary makes each year count twice, once in living and once in keeping. The baby photos beside the senior portraits, the first-binky entries beside the slower-lap notes, the whole archive I have been building toward something like my best moments album from baby photos to now. When people ask why I document so obsessively, the ledger is my answer: because counting is how I pay attention, and attention is the only currency that buys more time with anyone. Love hard, log everything, hope loudly. That is the entire financial plan.

I should add the quiet entry, the one about ordinary Tuesdays. The ledger is not only milestones and scares; most of its lines are plain days, hay refilled, water changed, a head-nudge answered, nothing to photograph. Those are the entries that actually fill the account. A decade of rabbit years is not ten dramatic chapters. It is three thousand quiet mornings, each one small, each one compounding. Tonight counts as one of them, and I am writing it down before sleep precisely so the ordinary gets its due beside the extraordinary.

She woke up as I finished, stretched one ancient leg, and head-butted my hand for the evening treat, which is her way of closing the books. Whatever the number turns out to be, eleven or twelve or the full fourteen, tonight she is warm, heavy, and here, snoring faintly against my wrist while the house settles. Past ten is house money. I intend to spend every coin of it on hay, sunbeams, slow evenings exactly like this one, and whatever small tomorrows she still wants to share with me.

🐰

Written by Azmi

I track my rabbits' diet, weight and naps to see what works. Photos are mine, mess included. Say hi on the contact page.

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