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I was setting out for a walk early in the morning and I'd opened my back door.
I was putting on my boots.
And I heard the sound of a man shouting and a dog barking, which is pretty unusual for where I live.
There was no reason for anyone to be in the immediate vicinity of the house.
And so I was a bit surprised and curious.
This was in the winter of 2021.
Chloe Dalton was living in the English countryside.
And I put on my boots and I went out and I couldn't see any sight of the man or the dog.
But within I don't know 200 meters I stumbled across a small animal lying out in the open in the middle of this track that's used by farm vehicles.
And I looked at it from a distance and I knew immediately that I was looking at a baby hare.
You don't...
And normally you only ever see a hair if it's running away from you.
So you see it for a few seconds running off in the distance.
And this was a perhaps one or two day old hair.
It was smaller than the palm of my hand.
It had jet black eyes, this beautiful thick coat.
It didn't seem to be injured.
Chloe wondered if it had been separated from its mother.
I sort of assumed that this little animal had perhaps been chased by the dog I'd heard, or picked up and carried in its mouth.
That can sometimes happen.
But I just hoped that if I left it in peace, there would be a happy ending and its mother would come back for it.
But I went back four hours or so later, not really expecting to see it, but it was lying in exactly the same place in a very exposed position without any cover, and it hadn't moved at all.
Chloe watched the baby hare, or leveret, trying to decide what to do.
It had these incredibly long slender front paws, almost you know no, thicker than a pencil, very fragile looking, these long, long ears, already really big in proportion to the body so that even from its first hours a little hare can hear out.
Listen out for danger.
And then it had the makings of a hare's really big, long back paws.
It wasn't a sort of helpless little animal.
Obviously, it was beautiful and appealing in the way that young creatures are.
But there was something about it that was it was the wildest animal I'd ever seen, in every detail, in the way that it was perfectly equipped for its own survival.
But the longer Chloe stood there watching it, the more she wondered if she should do it was injured.
There are a lot of predators in the area, foxes, buzzards, hawks of different kinds.
And I stood there and tried to think what the right thing to do would be.
And I'm not even sure I did the right thing.
I should be really upfront about that.
But what I did?
I thought I had this idea that I could pick up this little animal, be very careful not to touch its fur directly so I wouldn't transfer my scent to it, and that I thought I would take it inside just for a couple of hours until darkness fell.
When I had this plan that I would return it to the field, to exactly the same place where I found it, but in the meantime hopefully prevent it from being hit by a car or taken by a wild animal.
Chloe remembers crouching down next to the baby hare, and it didn't try to run away from her.
She took some handfuls of grass, to avoid touching it with her bare hands.
And it let her pick it up.
It was weightless.
It was extraordinarily light.
And it was smaller than the palm of my hands.
I held it close to my chest.
I was very quiet.
I walked home.
I put it on a countertop and...
I looked at it and I rang somebody who's a conservationist, who knows a lot about animals, and said this is what I've done.
Do you have any advice?
And he said to me, look, I'm sorry to tell you, but this is not likely to end well.
You know, the little Everett's mother may well have been killed by the dog that you heard.
Even if she's alive and you return the Everett to the field, you It's likely to smell of humans.
A mother might reject it.
And moreover, he said to me, you know, the chances are that it will die.
Hairs don't do well in human hands.
These are animals that have never been domesticated.
You should get yourself ready for the fact that it will probably die.
He said it would probably die of either shock or hunger.
When leverets are frightened, they can clamp their jaws shut.
Chloe called her sister, who worked nearby on a farm and had a lot of experience taking care of animals.
And so I knew that she knew a thing or two about sort of raising, for example, baby lambs that had lost their mothers and things like that.
So I called her, and she had never seen her hair.
But she just said to me she gave me one really good piece of advice, which is that lots of animals can't digest milk that has lactose in it.
Probably the same is true for a hare.
I'm going to bring you some of the milk, or some of the powdered milk that we use to feed lambs on the farm, and you should try that with this hare.
Chloe's sister brought her the powdered milk and some sterilizing fluid.
To calculate how much milk to feed it, Chloe wrapped the leveret in a cloth and put it on a kitchen scale.
It weighed less than four ounces.
She sterilized a small bottle with a dropper, held the leveret in one hand and used the dropper to squeeze milk into its mouth.
She says she couldn't tell how much milk it was actually drinking.
And the little leveret ended up by falling asleep on the palm of my hand, sort of dozing off.
Chloe put the leveret down on the carpet and sat down at her computer to find information about taking care of hares.
She says she was able to find lots of information about caring for rabbits, but didn't see anything about hares.
Later, she did find some instructions, but they were only for hunting them or cooking them.
That evening, Chloe found an old shoebox and lined it with grass.
Before going upstairs to bed, She placed the leveret inside.
And I went to bed just hoping for the best, but having no idea if I would wake up in the morning and find that it had died.
So I rushed downstairs in the morning.
I was really nervous about even opening the door into the room where I was keeping it, you know, worried that it might not have made it through the night.
But I found the leveret sitting upright, its ears up, looking quite alert.
Chloe was working from home at the time.
It was during COVID, and she spent a lot of her day on calls and working at her desk.
The first full day with the leveret, she fed it every few hours.
She says sometimes it would fall asleep after eating, resting on her chest.
She would take it outside to her fenced-in garden to use the bathroom after each feeding.
After meals, she would return it to its nest in the shoebox.
I'd already cut the side of the box out, so it would have been able to move out of the box anytime it wanted to.
But it didn't.
It would just stay exactly in place and only become active towards the end of the day.
And I now understand.
I didn't realize at the time that it was doing what a baby hare would do in the wild, which is their mother hides them, usually just in a clump of grass.
She separates her leverets and hides them in different places so that if a fox or coyote or whatever it might be comes along, they're not going to succeed in killing off all of the leverets in one go.
And so when this little leveret was in its box, it would just stay sort of huddled in the hay unmoving for hours on end.
Chloe put the box in a spare room that had a door to the outside.
During the day she left, that door cracked, as well as the door to the rest of the house, so the hare could go wherever it wanted.
She says she never wanted it to feel trapped.
Chloe finally found a website with useful information about caring for hares.
It said hares usually weaned off milk by around eight weeks old.
She decided to keep taking care of the leveret while it still needed milk, and in the shirt every time she fed it.
Whenever she approached it, she sang softly, hoping to avoid startling it.
She avoided touching it unnecessarily, and when she picked it up to feed it, she wrapped it in a cloth.
She would be quite close to my face and she would turn her head on one side, so her eye would be looking right at me, and they have this very, very wide field of vision.
Their eyes are on the side of their head and they can see almost 360 degrees around them, which is sort of incredible when you think about how limited a human field of vision is by comparison.
And I would look at her eye and I could see myself.
Not just myself, but the sky behind me reflected in this eye.
And I would wonder, what do I look like to this hair?
I'm Phoebe Judge, and this is Love.
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By the time the hair was about two weeks old.
Chloe Dalton says it had started moving around the house freely.
And at that point it established this absolutely regular routine that really surprised me, which is that every single day, at about it would be active in the morning and then, come nine o'clock, The lever it would climb the stairs behind my desk where my office is, where I was working every single day.
It would climb up the stairs and it would sleep under the bed all day long until about four o'clock.
It would come down the stairs.
I would hear its paws on the stairs and it would pass by me and it would go out into the garden and then it would be active again for the evening.
Sometimes I would read lying on the sofa, but usually by this point, reading books about hares, and it would come and it would lie on the windowsill near me and look out of the window.
Chloe had started reading anything she could find about hares.
I came to realize that had I done this, that had I lived with a hare in my house 200 years ago in Britain, I would probably have been prosecuted as a witch, because it was a common belief not only that there were witches, but that witches would disguise themselves or shapeshift into the form of hares in order to run around the landscape and commit all these sort of malicious acts.
So There are all sorts of stories about, for example, a man or a group of men go out hunting and they shoot a hare and they only wound it lightly.
And the hare runs back towards a cottage and enters this cottage and followed by the hunters.
When the hunters open the door, they find an old woman who's holding her side where she's bleeding where the hare was shot.
You know there are so many of these stories ideas, that you couldn't take a hair onto a boat because it would sink.
Or if a hair ran down the street in your town, someone's house was going to burn down.
There's an old Cornish legend about something called the white hair, which was said to be either a sign of a coming storm or the spirit of a quote.
Broken-hearted maiden, determined to haunt her faithless lover.
There's a 13th century poem that tells you what to recite to protect yourself if you cross paths with a hare.
Julius Caesar once wrote about hares and described how people considered them sacred and wouldn't eat them.
Hares have been found in ancient burial sites in Ireland.
A 17th century English author said that if you ate hare meat, you would have nightmares.
But some of the most sort of surprisingly moving accounts that I found about hares were written by hunters people who'd spent their whole life trying to capture and chase down hares.
Had this incredible, in many cases, respect for the athleticism of an animal that can leap enormous distances, that can run at these incredible speeds.
There are all sorts of stories by English hunters about the way hares will appear to cooperate with each other in order to try to escape hounds.
They would be chasing a hare over a long distance, many miles, with a pack of hounds, and the hare would reach the end of its tether and the end of its endurance and it would drop down onto the ground next to a hare that was lying in position there and then the fresh hare would take off and lead the hounds away.
Sometimes Chloe would watch the leveret out in the garden.
She says it seemed to enjoy playing by itself, running across the grass, jumping high in the air.
If Chloe was in the and then away again, as if it wanted to be chased.
She noticed something else that it often did when it seemed to be playing.
It would stop in front of any soft piece of cloth, for instance, a curtain.
You love to do this with curtains.
It would go behind a curtain and then, just Sitting on its hindquarters, it would take its front paws and then beat the cloth really, really fast, like we would with drumsticks, but obviously just with its paws.
And so it produced this sort of rattling, rolling sound. you know, fast patter of its paws.
And if I left a t-shirt on the floor, it would do the same thing.
It seemed to enjoy the sound because if whatever piece of fabric it was, for instance a cushion cover, you know with a cushion inside, would produce sort of the loudest noise,
And that was where it seemed to enjoy, you know, drumming the most.
Sometimes if there was a heavy rainstorm and you could hear the.
In her reading, Chloe came across.
In one of William Cooper's poems he described what he fed his hares.
By this time, Chloe had started to wonder what she should feed the hare besides milk, to make sure it would be ready to live in the wild.
I tried every single item on his list and some of the words were very old-fashioned and I had to sort of look up what sow thistle was, and it was a particular type of thistle and it was a variety.
He fed his hares, you know, breadcrumbs and carrot peel and apple peel and things like that, as well as herbs and grasses gathered from the fields.
And I had a different experience, which is that because the leveret was free to go in and out of the house, it decided itself what it wanted to eat for the most part.
So it would disappear into the garden and it would eat, you know, things like dandelions absolutely loved dandelions.
But I did try things like raspberries the little leveret loved.
He would only eat one.
Hares never gorge.
They're very dainty eaters.
And it would take its time and it would chew this raspberry very, very slowly.
And it was the sweetest sound of a little hare kind of slowly chewing, chewing its way through a raspberry.
As the weeks went by, Chloe noticed how much she'd adapted her own life to the hare's patterns.
She'd started waking up with the sun and going to bed when it went down.
During the day when the hare was sleeping, she tried to be as quiet as possible moving around the house.
She asked any visitors who came over to talk quietly.
She stopped wearing perfume, stopped watching TV.
She says she wanted to limit anything that might disturb the hare.
The one idea I held onto was that This animal didn't belong to me.
It belonged to itself.
It belonged in the wild.
And then one night, the hare changed its routine.
I used to bring it inside when it was very small.
I would gather it up from the garden and bring it in and shut the door and know that it was safe under my roof, because
We have a lot of foxes.
Foxes come through the garden most nights.
We have stoats.
There are feral cats.
There's all sorts of carnivores that could make short work of a leveret.
But there was one evening when I stepped out and I found the leveret lying at the foot of a tree, sort of huddled down in the grass.
And I looked at it and I was about to pick it up, but just something made me think it's choosing to be here.
It can see the night falling.
This is its environment.
It's utterly camouflaged.
I should leave it.
And I went inside and shut the door and went to bed.
And again, it was a repeat of that first night.
It was that feeling of, am I going to regret this?
But, you know, will it survive the night?
But I just felt At that point, I should respect its choice.
It wanted to be outside.
If it wanted to come in, it would have been in already.
After that, the leveret always slept outside.
But it still spent time inside.
It liked to lay in the doorway of Chloe's office.
Chloe noticed that out of everything she fed it, it seemed to like dry oats the best.
She left a small bowl out for it at all times.
And then one day, Chloe was standing in the kitchen, watching the hare in the garden.
And my eye fell on this dry stone wall, as we call it, which is a particular way walls are built in the countryside here.
It's quite high, more than four foot tall.
And the hare, it was standing on top of this wall, looking at me.
And... there was only two ways it could go.
It could drop back down into the garden, or it could jump down on the other side and it would be in the wild.
And I just froze.
I looked at it.
I didn't try to call to it.
I just waited to see what it would do.
But I remember thinking, this is the goodbye.
And sure enough, Its ears were swiveling.
It was taking in, I think, all of this extra sound.
It was gauging the distance, the drop to the ground on the other side.
And it leapt down and it disappeared.
You know, immediately beyond the wall is the start of a big rolling field of corn, and it disappeared quite quickly.
I could watch it for a little period of time.
I could see it almost getting more and more indistinct, as it adopted the hare's cloak of invisibility, that their fur is designed in such a way that they almost sort of dissolve into the landscape.
And for one minute I could see it, and then... then it was gone.
And I thought to myself, well, you know, it's over.
And I imagined it sort of picking up speed as it realized there wasn't a barrier in front of it like a fence or a wall or a gate.
And it was almost as if I could sort of vimp, As if I could sort of transplant myself into the body of the hare in that moment and just picture what it must be like encountering the wild in that way.
And I was quite proud of myself for my reaction, and I tried to keep my emotions under quite tight control.
So I was being very rational about why this was a good thing.
And then I walked back into the house and...
It didn't take me long.
I was pulling out my chair to get back to my desk.
And I looked down and I saw a single porridge oat on the carpet that had fallen off the hair's paw.
And at that point I did shed some tears, I have to say, because I thought this was the end of a beautiful, magical experience that would never be repeated again.
But then, just before dusk, the hair reappeared at the garden gate.
Chloe says it stood there for a long time, with its ears extended, straight up.
And then it came back into the house.
The next day, the hair left again.
This time, just beyond the wall, Chloe saw it encounter another hair.
She watched them sniff noses.
She remembers feeling relieved that it hadn't been attacked. or rejected.
So from that point onwards, every single day, at about six in the morning, the leveret would leap over this wall, drop down into the garden, run or even race at quite high speed to the side of the house.
I would open the door and it would come, it would eat and then it would go.
And by this point, because it was a bit bigger, it didn't sleep under my bed anymore.
It chose to sleep stretched out across the doorway.
Um to my office uh, where there happened to be, it happened to have quite a slightly raised part of the house, so it has quite a good view.
The hair would have quite a good view of the of the room.
That might have given it a feeling of safety, but that was its um, its favorite uh, resting place, day in, day out.
Not long after the hair started jumping over the garden wall, Chloe decided to get a new sofa for her living room.
A mouse had gotten into the old one and chewed holes in the cushions.
I got someone to come and take the sofa away.
And I didn't think anything of it, but it was quite a large item in the environment that the hair was used to.
And As soon as it was taken out of the house, the lever had stopped coming back inside.
I mean, it would not set paw inside the house.
And I thought, this is very odd.
It would come all the way to the door.
It would look inside.
It would look, I mean, as far as I could tell, it would look a little bit sort of nervous.
And this went on for several days.
And I thought to myself, If I don't do something, I will have driven this animal away.
So I had to get the sofa back.
I had to call the person that had it and say, I'm really sorry, but I need that back.
And I bought it back.
But even then, the hair wouldn't come back in the house.
It was only when I'd taken all of the sofa cushions off and left them outside for a couple more days and perhaps had lost any unfamiliar smell.
Only when that had happened did the hair come back in the house, and I still have the sofa.
I have to say.
Months went by without a change in the hair's or Chloe's routine.
But in February of 2022, about a year after Chloe first found the hair, she had to go on a trip for work.
She tried to put it off for as long as possible.
Because it felt like a magical experience.
It felt like some sort of spell.
I was living almost like a childhood fairy tale, you know, of the comings and goings of this extraordinary animal that didn't need me but seemed to be comfortable and willing to rest alongside me.
But when I realized I would have to travel, I thought, what am I going to do?
I don't want the hair to ever be unable to come into the house, since it seems to want to sleep in the house every single day, but I can't leave my house open when I'm gone.
Chloe installed cameras outside her house so she could see when the hair was waiting outside her door.
And she asked her mother, who lived nearby, if she'd be willing to drive over to let the hair in and out.
Chloe remembers anxiously checking the cameras. the whole time she was gone.
And everything had gone swimmingly.
The hare came every single day and slept in the house.
My mother let it in and when it wanted to leave she came back and opened the door so it could go out into the wild.
But then a few days before I came back, the hare disappeared.
We'll be right back.
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Indeed, when chloe dalton returned from her long work trip, she couldn't find any sign of the hair.
I couldn't see her in the garden.
She wasn't coming to the house.
I thought perhaps the thing that I've been fearing has happened.
Perhaps, you know, a predator has, has got hold of her.
Perhaps she's unwell um, but i i didn't give up hope, but i was worried and one evening, a couple of days after my return, i was looking out of the window, probably looking for her.
Um, it was just before nightfall and i saw this in the flower bed outside.
I saw the little stirring in the bushes, in the undergrowth and uh, I thought to myself oh no, a rabbit has got into the garden, because that would sometimes happen and, unlike hares, they dig holes.
And I thought, oh, this is going to be a rabbit.
And I looked, and the plants moved, and I realized there were three small animals there.
And I looked closer and I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
But I realized after a few moments that they were three baby hares.
And I realized that Mother Hare wasn't around because she was looking after these babies.
And, sure enough, she appeared not long after and she'd been hiding in the garden where she had given birth to the leverets and she had.
She was looking after them and i was absolutely amazed.
As you can imagine, i thought i couldn't imagine something more incredible.
The idea that this wild animal had chosen to give birth in my garden seemed to me just unbelievable, and i got to watch how a mother hare raises her, How she keeps them safe, how she hides them, how she feeds them at night.
I learned another thing about hares that I hadn't found in any of the books.
Books about hares describe them as solitary animals, and here was a mother hare, definitely playing with her young, staying nearby guarding them.
I watched her chase off a crow that had come close to them.
And crows could easily kill a baby hare.
And even though the crow was sort of bigger and taller than the hare, she raced at it with her paws extended and she chased it off.
And I just thought I'd never seen anything braver, frankly.
The Leveretts never spent time inside the house.
They mostly stayed in the gardens. until they were old enough to start jumping over the wall.
For a while they returned in the evenings, but eventually, when they got older, the mother hare was the only one who came back.
Chloe had a carpenter make a custom hare-sized door into the house, so the mother hare wouldn't have to wait for Chloe to let her in or out.
By this time she would lie in the house and she would fall fast asleep on her side with her stomach stretched out.
You see this beautiful white stomach and these incredibly long legs.
And so because I watched her so closely, I could notice if she did something unusual.
And one day I noticed it was a hot summer's day and she was lying on the gravel in front of the kitchen, not somewhere that she would normally lie.
It looked a bit uncomfortable, frankly.
And she was sort of stretched out on her side and she was sort of, she was shifting.
And at some point in the middle of the day she rushed into the house and she disappeared behind the curtain in my office, right behind the desk.
And this is a put themselves in an enclosed space.
They have to have clear lines of sight to any possible danger.
So I left her to it and I thought this was a bit odd.
And she was behind that curtain for about an hour.
And then suddenly I noticed that she was leaving the house and she was in the garden.
She was eating kind of hungrily.
She looked quite ravenous actually.
And I crept into the office and I pulled the curtain just a fraction away from the wall.
And I looked down and, to my utter astonishment, there on the carpet were two newborn hairs, you know, less than an hour old at this point.
Eyes open dark chocolate, brown fur, side by side.
And I realized that, having thought that there was nothing more extraordinary that she could do than to give birth in the garden, she had chosen to give birth in the house, and not only in the house, but in my actual office behind the chair, where I worked every single day.
After a few hours, she came back and she hid them in different corners of the room.
And they were just as she did when she was small.
From dawn until nightfall, they would hide and I would pretend I couldn't see them.
And they, I don't know, didn't know what to make of me, but they knew they had to hide where they were.
And I left them in peace as much as possible.
But if I was in the room, I would make sure to leave well before dusk.
And they would come out of their hiding places and they would sit in a little pile and lick each other and wait for their mother.
And as soon as it was dark, she would come racing in.
She would stand over them in this very protective stance, with her forepaws wide and her ears bolt upright, listening for danger.
And she would feed them and clean them in the house.
And that's where they grew.
As the Leveretts grew older, they began exploring the house.
They also started drumming on things, just as the mother hare had done.
One of their favourite things to drum on was a large inflated exercise ball.
Chloe remembers hearing them racing around her office in the middle of the night.
They were very, very curious.
There was no part of the house they wouldn't explore.
They were very active at night.
I moved to a different bedroom because they were spending a lot of time in bedrooms in my bedroom at night, and even though I moved to the other end of the house, they soon followed.
And I didn't get any peace, but I absolutely loved it because it was just sort of fascinating to see what two young hares do together as opposed to one
By the time the Leverts were three weeks old, they'd started going out into the garden.
Then Chloe had to leave on another work trip.
When she returned, she noticed that the mother hare seemed to be less active than usual, spending a lot of time lying by the flower beds.
And then one day, Chloe noticed a third baby leveret in the garden.
It looked much younger than the others.
She later saw the mother hare feeding it.
And when I did the math, I realized that the pregnancies must have overlapped.
This is one of the things that contributed to the reputation that hares have, I think, for being associated with witchcraft, because they have this very rare ability.
It's still not fully understood.
It's slightly disputed.
Some people say it doesn't happen, but I am fairly confident it does happen that they can carry two pregnancies in parallel, two separate pregnancies.
And this was discovered very early on by very early philosophers and scientists who dissected hairs.
And they thought this was unnatural.
It's not something humans can do.
It has a technical name.
It's called superfetation.
And in essence, it means a hair can get pregnant while it's already pregnant.
Chloe found herself feeling especially fond. of the single leveret in the garden.
She says that of all the babies, this one resembled the mother hare the most.
One day in late August, Chloe noticed the youngest leveret was acting strangely.
I noticed it lying in the garden and that there was something not quite right about it.
Its posture, hairs, they hold themselves.
Even when they're relaxed, you can tell they're ready to run and ready to flee.
And I could just see that this lever, it didn't look right.
It was breathing unevenly and seemed too weak to lift its head.
Chloe held it.
It had no strength in its legs, so these beautiful long legs of a hair were just hanging down my body.
Chloe tried to feed the leverts some milk, but it didn't seem like it could drink.
She placed it on the carpet in front of the fireplace.
And it died.
And I don't know what happened to it.
It wasn't wounded that I could tell.
It sickened very suddenly.
The other hares, the mother hare and her two leverets that were there at the time, they were fine.
But this little one just seemed destined not to make it.
And you buried it?
Yes, I buried it in the corner of the garden and I, you know, knowing what I know about how aware the hares are of changes to their environment, I wondered what the other hares made of this.
Chloe says the mother hare and the other leverets didn't return to that part of the garden for several months.
Hares in the wild don't normally live more than three or four years.
A writer named Ernest Thompson Seton once wrote, No wild animal dies of old age.
Its life has soon or late a tragic end.
It is only a question of how long it can hold out against its foes.
Every single day that I lived alongside the hare, I knew, when she left in the morning or in the evening to roam the fields to live out in the open, that she might never come back.
The last time Chloe saw the mother hare was in December of 2024, almost four years since she first found her.
I have to conclude that she's come to the end of her life.
She disappeared one day and she didn't come back.
I never saw her body.
I don't know.
She vanished just as silently and quickly as she had entered my body.
But I'd had well over three years with her at this point and I still had her leverets.
And since the you know, in the months that followed her disappearance, her leverets had their own leverets in the garden.
And so some days I have, I still have five hairs coming and going from the garden.
So I feel like I've been lucky enough to for the story not to have this abrupt ending that I thought it might have.
And I think maybe that's the point about nature.
If we're lucky enough to get a glimpse into how it works.
There's this continuity, there's this renewal.
There's still a small indentation in the carpet in the Hare's favourite place to sleep, right in the doorway of Chloe's office.
Chloe Dalton's book is Raising Hair, a memoir.
We'll have a link in the show notes.
This Is Love is created by Lauren Spohr and me.
Nadia Wilson is our senior producer.
Katie Bishop is our supervising producer.
Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane.
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I'm Phoebe Judge, and this is love.
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