Sunday, November 9, 2008

Weather Report: November 9, 2008

I admit it, I had grand plans.  In the final weeks before the election, when I'd developed a twitch in one eye due to obsessive  Huffington Post reading (and from the anxiety those daily emails from the Obama campaign were causing), I was going to get out with a camera and document what I think we all already knew, even then, no matter what the outcome was going to be, was history in the making... 

  • ...the car pool line at Elder Girleen's elementary school, the row of mini vans and station wagons and compacts, most with Obama stickers pasted to their bumpers....

  • ...a jack o lantern carved with the already-so-recognizable Obama campaign logo, placed on a front porch next to a house with a McCain/Palin yard sign ...

  • ...the GO VOTE exhortation chalked in pastel on the sidewalk  half a block away ...

  • ... the early morning line our neighborhood's polling place had never witnessed before...

So much has been written.   Judith Warner's New York Times column from last week, here, says much,  and so very eloquently.  

On Wednesday, November 5, I walked out my front door and was astounded to see that while I had my mind on other things, the leaves on the trees had miraculously, gloriously, shed the dull-green cast late summer gave them and turned gold.  I know we need rain like nobody's business, but the blue sky that's arched behind those trees this week, so cloudless, so saturated with color — it made me ache.  I don't think I've ever seen anything so hopeful.  

Yesterday, I drove interstate 20 in the early morning ... turned off it onto Highway 138 and began the drive to Athens, past Quick Trips that a month ago had no gas in their pumps, past blocky contemporary cemeteries where graves were brave with bouquets of plastic flowers.  Past a Baptist church where cut-apart and welded-back-together metal drum smokers had already been fired up and barbeque was in a couple of hours going to be sold.  Past a salvage yard that stretched out over acres, where the cars had been positioned nose to tail, starred of windshield, sporting crumpled bumpers. 

The first time I was able to vote, Ronald Reagan was elected president.  

The trees are at this moment such a brave lick of flame and color, and what if it really were morning in America, right now?

  

 

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