Prove All the Pessimists Wrong

“Did you hear the news?" a stocky man with white hair said to me on my way into the bank the other day.“No,” I said, dreading some fresh collapse, attack, or act of God.“They’re doing a recount in Ohio! And if they do it there, they’ll do it everywhere. This Obama: he doesn’t have a mandate!”I saw him  again five minutes later at the dry cleaners and ten minutes after that in the liquor store. He was saying the same thing to everyone he encountered and spoke with such earnest hopefulness it was all I could do not to hug him.Lots of people have been inspiring this sentiment in me over the last few days.There's high feeling out there. It could just be the remnants of Election Day fever.It could be the fact that we can all feel the suffering of those folks in the New York still without power, even if the feeling is coming to us only subliminally. Here are the rest of us buying snow shovels and joshing about this early snow that blew in over the last 48 hours but we’re all cozy in our warm kitchens at the end of the day. Those people are not.They are cold and in the dark and why isn’t there more coverage about their plight in the national media? Is it really because the girl star of the Twilight movies has recently been seen keeping company with someone other than her co-star boyfriend? Did I really hear Matt Lauer talking about that on the Today show yesterday morning as if it mattered?Sometimes you want to throw up your hands.Rush Limbaugh wants to throw up his.The day after the election he said “I went to bed last night thinking we’re outnumbered. I went to bed last night thinking all this discussion we’d had about this election being the election that will tell us whether or not we’ve lost the country. I went to bed last night thinking we’ve lost the country.”And they say women are prone to over-reaction (though not the people who actually know any real women.)I like what Joe Klein said at the end of his piece in Time this week. He said "There are some things I can just about guarantee, no matter who wins this election. The fiscal cliff will prove a mirage. There will be a budget deal. Taxes won't be lowered on individuals, but revenues will be raised as deductions and entitlements are severely curtailed for the wealthy. There will be a deal on immigration reform, as the Republican Party will have to embrace our glorious demographics sooner rather than later. We will not become Greece, as Romney suggests. We will struggle along, secure in our freedom, and eventually prosper. That is the American way: we make fools of pessimists.”I love that . Let’s go forward now and live into this American way he speaks of. Let’s get busy and prove all the pessimists wrong.

Goodbye to All That

This is how things looked at the lake we visit. I took this picture last weekend. Just last weekend!The warm morning light on the railings, the topaz hue of the leaves...Then at afternoon's end, there was this view from the end of a dock:How does the heart not break when one looks at such beauty? Especially now that Sandy  has come like an avenging angel sweeping all before her.God's own leaf blower is a hurricane.We wake to a wider sky today.More light, with the foliage gone.More light, in the day's early portion at least, with the thudding new arrival of Daylight Savings in the wee hours of this morning.I woke at 3:45 and never slept again. Don't know why.I wandered the house watering a few thirsty plants, then brought coffee back into my bed and read my book.The plants can't say they're crazy about being brought inside now that I've closed up the screened-in porch.Being next to a radiator is especially hard for them.But it's adapt or falter in this world. Out in the porch this peace lily would be frozen brown stalk in less than a month .And so it is with us. Adapt or falter.Get out of bed now. Sweep the leaves from your stoop.  Do your errands early so you can feel cozy when the night once again lowers.And think of all who, a week after the storm, still have no light or heat.