who are you and what have you done with my country?

it’s 6:30 a.m., soon after the first sunrise of a long night that will continue for years. I last checked the counting four hours ago. We didn’t get Florida, Georgia looked doubtful and North Carolina was teetering. These were the three must-gets for tRump and it looks like he’ll get them all. But we flipped Arizona, including the Senate seat (Huzzah! for Mark Kelly; now we have a real Space Cadet on Capitol Hill!) And we picked off an electoral vote in Nebraska. At 2:30 a.m. tRump hadn’t taken anything Hilary got in 2016, which keeps us still on track to win, but man oh man, this is sure-fugly winning.

The new voter said a couple more choice words, called the Town Clerk a bitch, leaned in, opened her unmasked mouth and forcefully exhaled directly into — and about 6 inches away from — the Clerk’s startled face. Then she left.

Who are we, America? How could so many of you look past the babies in the cages, the pandemic inertia, the lies! The ceaseless cataract of lying! The self-dealing. The tossed rolls of paper towels. Jeebus. The Ugliest American is the preferred candidate of tens of millions of my countrymen? Really? I don’t care who’s President; THAT‘s a massive political challenge right there, that is.

read on…

dialect

every July, a single tier of orange leaves shows up in the skirts of the maples along the road by my barn. Only tourists take these turned leaves for evidence of Fall. Actually, they are but a harbinger, arriving when the air is warm, the greens of the land are the greens of deep Summer, the birds are myriad and the butterflies are just emerging.

There is much to be said for living long in the same place, so that you become fluent in its commentary upon the passing scene, so that when you hear it speak in orange leaves in mid-July you understand that its remark is a reminder and not an announcement.