#1379 Electioneers

The recent all mail election offered a sad side note. Displaced election volunteers. If you’re like me, most of the times you’ve gone to vote in the past, you’ve gone to your polling place, at a church.
I loved the smell of Church polling places¾that combo of perfume, pledge on the pews, and damp mold on the hymnals. The semi-annual duty of democracy never changed it much, no matter who came in reeking of what in their endeavor to exercise the franchise. Maybe because no one has ever had the gall to pass gas in these hallowed halls, and it is the absence of residual odor rather than its presence that lends a church its unique angelic aroma.
I miss the election volunteers, the old ladies and gents that helped us when we voted. Who peeled off the “I Voted” sticker. Who checked my signature against the one in the book. Who ripped off my ballot stub. What do those people do now to replace that wonderful senior diversion?
I have this vision of elderly ladies not getting the memo and showing up to a deserted church on that first time in November after we converted to Vote-by-mail. They sat there and sat there, their lavender cachets and scented blue hair emanating an odor that mingled effortlessly with the aforementioned atmosphere of the church, like a soul ascending into heaven. With nothing to do, they chattered about great-grandchildren, broke out crochet hooks, and traded yarns about elections passed. One of them mentioned souvenirs and another, inspired, dug into her voluminous purse, and among the discarded tissues and cellophane butterscotch candy wrappers, she found and revealed, to the oohs and ahhs of her cronies, a bag of old chads, dimpled, bulging, and yes, hanging.
Like the sad head of a displaced volunteer…
America ya gotta love it.