Strange morning, full of dread, melancholy, hope, and love. Election day. Long lines and lots of nerves. Wonderful seeing so many women and so many families out voting together. It wasn’t too long ago I took my own kids with me to vote–the year my mother died (eight years ago, just about) we went to vote together. Our polling spot is just around the corner, but we drove because she was weak with cancer, and it was bitter cold.
After we cast our votes we went back to the car–we were talking about going out to breakfast, but the battery in the car was dead. She didn’t think she could make the walk, but I found someone who could give us a jump. When we got back to the house, we realized we’d left the front door wide open.
About a week later she was gone.
Impossible not to think of her, seeing all the mothers taking their kids to vote today. I remember the first time she took me–the way it felt to hold her hand, and go into the booth with her. It was one of the push button types with a lever that you’d pull to register the vote.
And then one memory leads to another, winding their way back through childhood, to the time we sat on the floor of my bedroom and she arranged lincoln logs in rows to teach me how to count, and show me how much older she was. Honeysuckles, mulberries, and looking at all the colors in cicada shells we collected together.
I wonder what she’d think of me transitioning; if she’d see me as the daughter I always was, or if she’d be caught up in the politics of it all. It would have been hard for her, I know that, but I like to think she’d have come round the first time we went shopping together, or I asked her for advice on what to wear. She told me proudly of how she refused to wear a hat in church when she was a little girl and sewed pockets onto her dresses. I think she would have enjoyed seeing as I am now. I think she would have liked the strangeness and adventure of it.
Eight years. Strange to think it’s been so long. Only yesterday, we were playing on the floor together, and I was hoping she would read me a story.
