My sister Laura has a cabin on Lake Lanier, in the woods of North Georgia. Last week, as she was driving out her driveway, she saw a white deer. A white deer! She writes about it on her blog, naturebasedblog.com.
The white fawn and her mother, an ordinary dun doe, were standing in the shady gravel road that winds through the woods alongside the lake. Laura knew it wasn't an albino, since it had one brown ear and a black nose. (Later she learned that it had a genetic condition called leucism, rare but not unknown among white-tail deer.) She was fumbling to find her phone, almost incapacitated by excitement, but she managed to get a picture, which you can see on her blog.
I can well imagine how excited she was. How absolutely magical! Were the perfumes of Arabia wafting through the air? Did the fawn's tiny hooves ring like delicate bells and throw twinkling stars as she walked? Did a lei of wildflowers adorn her neck? Was a unicorn standing at the edge of the woods?
If Laura saw a white deer, maybe we can look for those other things, too, except for one blotch of reality—the car. What was that hunk of metal, that man-made, smoke-belching, noise-polluting monstrosity doing in that picture, in those magical woods? It doesn't fit the image of white deer tiptoeing through the forest, flower-bedecked by fairies and followed by unicorns. I don't want it in the picture. I want to rub it out.
But there is a problem.
If I rub out the car, Laura disappears, too, and it becomes as unimaginable to see a white deer as to see a unicorn. That won't do. I want that white deer there in the road where Laura can see it. I'll have to leave the car in the picture, too, if I want the reality that somewhere in the woods a white deer really does wander and magical moments really do happen.
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