Red shoes

I see the world in pictures and in stories. I see people by what I see around the people. Often I recognize them by their hair, by their size and shape, but not by their face. I don’t know why, or why this even came to me, as I set about clearing a batch of pictures from my phone.

A little batch of pictures has hung around on my phone since election day. Not that long ago, but light years in my world of file them or get rid of them. Flags were at half staff that day. I had to look it up. The church shooting in Texas. What changes?

Of everything I lost to the Red Bus, my job was the worst. It connected me to the world more than any other piece of my brain that went spinning off. I have an email almost daily from the new fiscal officer: How does she do this or that or the other thing. And I know and I tell her. I did not lose that job for want of competence.

The new fiscal officer was appointed by the trustees to fill the vacancy when I left. She had to run for election in the next general election, in November. She had an opponent, which I never did in four elections. And, she won.

I vote in the town hall, and took my chances at finding Ron on my way out. The door still opens to the same key code, and the same voice from the office observed “I hear footsteps in the hall!” Ron moved Winston, the skull in wool hunter’s cap, from Doug’s chair, and I settled in for a catch up chat. Doug is off, nursing his replacement knee, you may recall.

First we talked grandbabies. Ron has his first, a boy who’s closing in on a year now. Actually, we shook hands on our way out the door, me to DC and him to Czechia, where the little fellow was just born. That’s the little guy, on the phone.

“I have a picture for you!” Ron said. This picture is so Ron, I must explain it. That’s the hood of a thirty five year old Ford tractor, on the last trip mowing ditches this year, “on Wetmore, your favorite road. It was a beautiful day! I had to take a picture.”

Here’s one more picture I didn’t use the other day. The branches over the road at Kendall Lake. I take this picture almost every spring and every fall, for the last many years.

And, for the end, our little girl with red shoes. Now her care is in the hands of a fifteen year old girl every day. Often in the afternoon I see her and her brothers coming down the road with the caretaker. The complex maintenance fellow says they’re still using space heaters in the house, but that’s all he knows. All I know, too. I need to figure out how to upload the doctor forms to the Rotary site.