daily snapshot(s): the velveteen giraffe

Two weeks passed between the Post story that said a two-alarm fire took place in "Burnsville" and when I saw the block of townhouses from Columbia Pike at Industrial Parkway, covered in plywood and blue tarp. Maybe "Burnsville" was a Freudian slip. I don't know. The houses weren't even near Burtonsville.

Today, Featherwood Street looks fairly normal: people jogging, buses carrying people home from work, tidy townhomes with tidy yards. But in the yard of the house at the end, the one whose back wall was completely stripped away by fire, there's a toy giraffe standing guard. Its body is two, maybe three feet tall, and completely charred. You know some kid had made it their best friend, and here it is now, waiting for them to come back. I wonder if, like the Velveteen Rabbit waiting to be burned, the giraffe will come to life as well and welcome the family home.

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."