The Highlight Of Working The Polls Is Spending The Day With Mrs. Ora Lee
PROTECTED CONTENT
If you’re a current subscriber, log in below. If you would like to subscribe, please click the subscribe tab above.
Username and Password Help
Please enter your email and we will send you a password reset link.
Hill Country Living
By Coulter Fussell
It’s early Monday morning and spring break is officially over. I may be more depressed about that than my teenage kids, which is saying a lot. I’m in a state of melancholy over it and stuck in a cycle of rehashing happy memories from yester week. The fond remembrances all involve me doing anything other than asking rote questions about gas money or backpacks or homework or clean clothes.
I enjoyed not parenting for seven full days. Now that my kids are older, I can just sort of set them loose into the spring break wilds of Yalobusha and Lafayette counties and hope for the best. Who knows what they did or where they went? All I know is that they showed back up to the house late Sunday afternoon asking for food and needing showers.
The only day last week that I had to get up before dawn was on Tuesday for the Presidential Primary Election Day. I worked the polls again with the usual crew out at Sylva Rena Community Center. It was the easiest poll-working day so far as the ticket for Democrats was uncontested and the Republican ticket was close to being uncontested as well. Turn-out was slow and easy. Everyone who voted was friendly, kind, and quick with a joke or two. This is very typical for the Sylva Rena poll-working experience.
Honestly, election day is just a time for everyone to visit and describe the virtues of a certain coconut cake, exchange snake stories, discuss possible destinies of a crooked-legged calf and share updates on bodily ailments. I won’t go into detail about what all was discussed with us because we Sylva Rena poll workers collectively decided that what is discussed at the Sylva Rena Community Center during poll working hours stays at the Sylva Rena Community Center. The secrets that you voters are telling the entire room are safe with us.
Dunn’s provides the poll workers at Sylva Rena Community Center with lunch on every election day and, I must say, that may be one of the main reasons why I continue to show up. The other main reason is watching fellow poll-worker, Mrs. Ora Lee Phillips, be a county-wide queen. Is there a person in these hills that she doesn’t know and who isn’t beyond pleased and moved to see her? Everyone wants to hug Ms. Ora and sometimes you can tell that she’s going through her mind’s Rolodex of people in an effort to place exactly whose grown child is hugging her 30 years after the last time she saw them. She is a master matriarch at work.
Poll-working is a long haul of a day and there are lots of checks and balances set up so that all is fair and accounted for these days. It’s been a real education to participate in poll-working these years and I’m not just talking about learning the systems of elections (which is fascinating enough on its own.) I also mean about disproving assumptions about people and our abilities to get along.
Lastly and unrelated, I look forward to seeing everyone downtown this weekend for the Friday night Wine Down event and the Casey Jones Music Festival on Saturday. See y’all there!
