The Election is Called
Freeport, November 15, 2020
The news comes as a text on my phone. I am at home with Bob in the woods in Freeport, it is warm like June and the sky is blue and endlessly cloudless as if it holds no uneasiness, finds no reason to fret. I’ve just taken a break from digging a 3 foot diameter, 1 foot deep hole in the clay that lies beneath the unmown field beside the house, a field crowded now with milkweed stalks, white and billowy in November like an old man’s beard, and the brown fists of ragweed and the thorny teeth of wild raspberry bushes. In hopes of foiling covid, Bob and I are building a firepit to gather around with friends. Covid is hiding everywhere in Maine now, biding its time, searching for open mouths, careless hands.
“The AP has called the presidential election for Joe Biden,” the text reads. I hoop and shout into the forest, but only later. First, I sob. Deep body shaking sobs I have no idea were waiting inside me, sobs like those of a lost child who, after a long search, is reunited with her parents and hurls herself into their arms. Within minutes the phone rings. My friend J. from Brooklyn is calling to share the news. “Can you hear it?” she asks. She holds her phone to the open window so I can listen to the honking cars, the cheering, the bells ringing in the streets. We cry together. “Remember Nixon’s line, ‘You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore?’” she asks. I remember. In a few hours, our friends will arrive and, as dark descends, I imagine us making fulsome toasts and dancing wildly in the driveway.
But, that night, around the fire, the group is not raucous with celebration. Instead, my friends, realists by and large, cautiously warm their hands on a small flicker of hope. The music we hook up on the front porch is too far away to hear and the song, Celebration, plays to the night moths and the stink bugs. The toasts never materialize. Uncertainty and fear about the future lurk on the lip of the fire. There are no flames hot enough or high enough to demolish them. Some people leave early. The day’s announcement does not bring an experience of transformation. The fire burns itself out with no one there to see it.
I must reconcile myself to the idea that there is no magic powerful enough for this moment. There will be no reincarnation of our normal lives, of the America of my imagination and my past. The story I once held about myself and my country is old and no longer holds. I have lost a vision of my future, and do not know the lines for the story of what happens next. Though Biden is remarkably qualified for this time and stepping into it wisely, he will encounter great obstacles.
There are no arms to rush into, there is no home to go back to, there is no song to save me, no drum beat to lose myself in. Instead there is this new reality of a country I hardly recognize, of a home where all the furniture has been upended and the siblings are not talking to one another and no one agrees on whom to call father.
And there, in the background, giggling, is the virus. Optimistic about its future. Thrilled for winter. Thrilled to be warm indoors. Thrilled to be at the party.