Long Way From Alaska
Today for the first time in two weeks I checked my Virginia mailbox. I took my mail into the cafe next door and seated myself at a table for four.
The cafe was busy with out of towners seeking in this Shenandoah Valley the pretty fall foliage. The hills though are not so infused with color this year. That big tree on Main St. in Sperryville is looking good again with its bright yellow leaves but overall the color is not so spectacular around here. It has been raining for 12 hours in this drought-stricken region so that could help and it is possible to have a fall color peak as late as early November. Or it could be another dull year.
I looked both at my mail and at a table of hipsters in black clothing and vintage head gear. In my mail was a new Gempler's catalog and I looked at it briefly before checking the numbers of a dwindling bank account and something in a non-descript envelope that turned out to be a credit card renewal.
I am a registered independent voter which perhaps explains why I received two glossy fold-out pamphlets from the McCain campaign suggesting that I might not know who is the real Barack Obama. According to one pamphlet he was a terrorist sympathizer and the other alerted me to the fact that he was soft on crime and also that he recently spent six hours with Leonardo DiCaprio and Barbara Streisand while only allowing twenty minutes to study the financial crisis. I studied the hipster table while digesting this news. I was hoping they would do or say something provocative but whatever they were saying was drowned out by a man at a table closer to me, explaining to a ten-year-old boy, in excruciating detail, all the features of a zero-turn lawn mower.
I frequently looked out the window to my right to see how it was different individuals heading for the post office handled themselves in the rain. There were two main groups--the cringing tiptoe-ers and the rain-gear-wearing sloggers.
I received an email this morning alerting me that two Democratic friends from California have booked their flights to be here in January for the presidential inauguration. I am guessing they did not receive, as I did, the glossy pamphlets from the McCain people, who judging by their wording are clearly desperate but still expect to be the ones greeting the cheering throngs in front of the Capitol building in January.
And I sincerely hope this is not an omen but waiting to pull into my parking space as I backed out was a car with Alaska plates.
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