Walking to the Polls

Yesterday evening I tucked my sample ballot into my bag and marched off to vote. The air blustered and slapped big rain drops onto the dry ground, creating that dusty smell of a brewing storm. I looked up at the sky and saw a double rainbow emerging from billowed clouds. A good sign. Maybe my vote will help change my state's politics, maybe schools will get proper funding, maybe people won't lose their homes, maybe emigrants won't be run off like mongrel dogs. Get to work rainbow, time's a wasting. But storms blow across the desert landscape so quickly and today blue sky has pushed the clouds to the horizon and I still live in a red state.

Yesterday I did what I do every election, completed the arrows on my ballot, selecting candidates, with a black marker while standing in a booth scantily draped for privacy in a church community hall, exercising one of my fundamental rights as an American citizen, me and an estimated 25% of registered voters in the state. My husband votes by mail-in ballot, but I hang on to the ritual of walking to the polls, being greeted at the door by a volunteer, showing my picture I.D. to another volunteer, signing in, being handed my ballot from yet another volunteer, marking my ballot, and feeding it into the ballot-counting machine while the last volunteer hands me a "I voted today" sticker and asks me to have a nice day. Voting by mail seems a lonely practice by comparison. Though it is less convenient, I make myself walk to the polls to vote, because my whole body gets to be reminded that voting matters, it is an active and vital part of living in a democratic society. I think of my great grandmother who was born long before women's suffrage and how she drove rural women to the polls in Santa Barbara so they could vote for the first time. I try not to think of hanging chads in Florida.

Postcard from Greece aka my face when I found out Reagan had won

I have only missed one election since turning 18, the year I made my first trek to Europe, at 19. Yes, I was in Athens when Ronald Reagan became the President of the United States. My old governor became the oldest American president while I was buying postcards in the Plaka. Too excited about the three months I was going to spend touring the Old Country with my best friend from high school/current college roomie, I never thought about absentee ballots. I didn't vote, so I had to spend the next four years not complaining about Reagan, his trickle-down economics plan, cuts to welfare, education, and the EPA, or any other policy and practice he established.

Never again. I always vote, but secretly feel guilty that I will probably never volunteer to hand voters a sticker and tell them to have a nice day.