This is a view of the back pastures at Refuge Farm yesterday afternoon. It was a magnificent day, Autumn greeting us with a gentle cool wind, cloudless blue skies, and our buzzards wheeling majestically in the heavens above.

Our editorial staff wanted to roll with a piece from Marlow that incorporates some of the deep and conflicting emotions of this astonishing year in our nation’s extraordinary history. I exercise what is left of my cognizant authority to affirm that we had a very good day yesterday, one filled with wonder about the beauty and resilience of this, our only world.

I will not bore you with the human factors that filled the sunshine and rustled with the gentle breeze in the leaves now preparing to depart. They were good, and I am thankful for them. One that I will mention was a ritual that I have been anticipating for some time. It was shortly after lunch. The sunshine beckoned. I felt the urge to satisfy a civic requirement.

I folded up the walker, and Grace manhandled it out to the gate in the fence in front as I clambering gingerly down the back steps toward the car. It started, a welcome sign, and with the tripod cane stowed in the passengers seat, drove up to open the back gate and slid the four-wheeled contraption into the cluttered cargo area. I hobbled back to the driver’s side and slid myself in, buckled up, and drove the car to the farm lane and in the direction of town. I had the window down and the fresh air was galvanizing, almost electric in its feeling of life. It rustled the newly shorn hair on my head, and I had to smile at the sensation of life and the act of living.

I took Business Route-29 into town, where the old narrow street attempts to accommodate traffic headed north and south. It has not changed much in dimension since armed troops occupied town a while back, and accordingly poses a few challenges to pedestrians. I passed the cool shops and restaurants of East Davis St I have not visited since the Governor told us to stay home. A block or so past my destination I saw an open spot to park and pulled to the curb to begin the dance of disembarkation.

At length, I managed to unfold the walker and leverage it onto the sidewalk for the short walk up the street. At my destination a cheery local man in a sanitary mask greeted me and pulled open the door. He asked if I had requested anything about my business in the mail. I responded that I had not, and wanted to accomplish my business in person.

He nodded and held the door as I hopped the front wheels over the stoop and joined a short line of citizens standing in a socially prescribed distance on the way to the elevator.

The Registrar is on the second floor and the building is stately and old. When I advanced to press the summons button, I had enough time to sit on the seat of my wheeled contraption and wait for the car to arrive. It was pretty smooth. A nice young man in a flamingo t-shirt was seated inside the door. I handed him my photo identification and he compared it to something on his laptop screen. He nodded, asked if I was me, and I nodded, suddenly realizing my mask was still sitting on the console back in the car. There was no mention of it, perhaps in deference to the walker user.

I advanced to through the door to the next office and was handed a piece of paper. Two other citizens, apparently a couple, were close together and playing with freshly cleaned pens. A masked man stood near a scanning device near to the exit door, and I carefully looked at the little bubbles to be filled in on the paper. When the couple had competed their business and fed their papers into a scanner, I followed and did the same at what I thought was an appropriate distance.

When complete, the burly man instructed me to insert my pen into a bin for sanitization, and the pin that held some colored stickers. I complied with instructions, and thanked him for his service before wheeling myself back out to the elevator.

The trip back to the car was a little more complex than the arrival, since it is slightly downhill and there is a street to cross. I avoided achieving terminal velocity, and waved a Jeep to complete his turn onto the street rather than hurry across. Loading the walker, waiting for the close-aboard traffic to thin and all the rest took a few minutes, but was pleasant enough. I took the time to peel the sticker off of its backing and plastered it on my t-shirt.

The car started again with Teutonic efficiency, and I motored north out to the big box retailing sector and the connection to southbound express lanes and eventually the two turns that brought me to the farm lane again. I crunched over the gavel and decided to leave the walker in the car for some other day.

I felt great, and had a Marlboro as I looked over the pastures. Thank God- I voted for one of the irritating people on the ballot. All the rest of this tawdry circus and every piece of slick advertising that will arrive in the next six weeks can be ignored. I ground out the cigarette and prepared to enjoy the rest of a marvelous day.

Vote. It is not bad.

Copyright 2020 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com