In any case, not a good camera day.
Four years ago, the campus buzzed on election day. Today, you could not tell that anything out of the ordinary was taking place. State Street, too, looked bleak. Empty.
I did vote. In my small place south of Madison. Anyone who has voted will tell you that election places in this country are not terribly photogenic for a person just passing through with a camera in her pocket. Gym rooms, church halls, community centers… Institutional settings. Bare walls, harsh lighting, somber faces, and a handful of observers, watching, waiting. (In my little corner of Wisconsin, they tell me they have observed nothing amiss.)
At Paul's Cafe we exhaled, but not for long.
Home. A wet, wet, drippy farmette. Ed is trailing behind me, I greet Isis who has that 'where have you been?? It's dinner!' look about him.
So I feed him in the sheep shed -- which we still think of as his home base -- and then I retreat to the farmhouse. With a look toward the wet fields, the drippy orchard branches.
But Isis follows me right back to the farmhouse, and now Ed is here as well, and I'm cooking, and Ed is trying, trying so hard to use credit reward points to purchase some secondary flights for us in January, and the election results are starting to come in, and it is at this time that Isis decides to call the farmhouse his home, and he demonstrates this by basically emptying his gut and his bladder in favorite spots -- an (apparently) favorite carpet, a closet, oh thanks, Isis! My cauliflower is burning, Ed's on the phone with the Rewards people and Florida is undecided and you poop and pee now? What kind of a cat are you?
Fact is, it's not his fault. We've avoided the inevitable. He likes it here. Yet, I never agreed to have a litter box here. We just let him out when he wanted to be let out. It worked.
Until today. The rains came down, Isis stayed in. Without a litter box, he created his own favorite bathroom situations.
And Florida is still undecided.
Ed is now playing volleyball (he's hardcore about it: if there is a game, he plays), I've cleaned up, Isis is sleeping on the couch next to me. Let the elections results roll in!
(And if anyone didn't think Wisconsin counted, it did. And two minutes ago, NBC called it. I exhale.)
