The day after President Obama was re-elected, I walked to the cemetery, around the cemetery’s duck pond, around the reflection trails. Bon Iver’s “The Wolves” played in my headphones and I thought about the election, how many women swept into power, how the national sentiment about marriage equality seems finally to be changing. And there, in a grove of trees at the cemetery’s edge: the white deer. She was eating with three other deer, stepping carefully among tree branches and fallen brown leaves, but I saw her first: a shock of white through a line of gravestones.
I took out my headphones, started moving slowly in her direction. She saw me, raised her head now and then to monitor my progress, but didn’t run away, kept eating grass and leaves. As I got closer, the other deer moved further into the trees, but she held her ground, clearly paying attention to what I was doing, but not willing to turn away. When I got as close as I thought I could, I stood still and watched her move, watched the pink in her ears, the movement of her white tail. And she watched me.
The day after we re-elected the first person of color to the presidency, I listed to Bon Iver—a bastardization of “bon hiver,” “good winter” in French—and a song called “The Wolves” played in my ears, and the white deer appeared, let me watch her, watched me. I was thinking about the election, how people waited in line for hours to vote, how much money billionaires spent trying to influence their vote. How disappointed many of us had been in President Obama’s first term—and how hopeful we remain in the second.
I don’t know what I want to say about this other than I stood in the cemetery, a place I love to walk—its quiet, thoughtfulness—and the white deer appeared. Ghostly. Brilliant. Moved along a line of headstones. Let me watch her.
I know there will be other awful, bitter races. I know racism, sexism, homophobia aren’t dead because of one election’s results. But I took comfort in the white deer, in the hope of a “good winter,” in the hope of how far we’ve come. In the hope of how far we have left to go.
Planet of the Blind 
Hey, it’s Kyle from the Proust group… you should read the chapter in Moby Dick called: “On the Whiteness of the Whale.”
LikeLike