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Sometimes you send children to retrieve something and, after a cursory glance in the general area, they proclaim that they “can’t find it anywhere.” Invariably, the grownup goes to the same room/drawer/shelf and finds the very thing they sent the child to get. When I was a child, my mom, frustrated by my lack of observation, would say, “If it had been a snake, it would have bitten you!” (Attribute that to her grandmother’s sharecropper upbringing in Georgia—my mother has never seen a snake in the wild.)
