Today, is municipal election day. No big deal. Just, a few school board members and some propositions. Nothing too controversial. Anne is working the polls today as an election official. She got up at uh-oh dark thirty and was gone well before sun up. It should be an easy, if long day for her. Unlike last November’s election, turnout should be pretty light. Giving her plenty of time to work on her knitting and get paid for it too. Her polling place is the neighborhood elementary school, site of her old favorite substitute teaching position. It has been more than a year since she last substituted. For a long time school was only virtual. Now it is reopened. With its reopening requests for her services have also reappeared. So far, she has ignored them, but today she might actually see someone who wants her to come back to work. It’s a lot easier to dismiss a text message than someone you know, in purpose. Of late, she has been seriously toying with the idea of permanently retiring, but you know what they say, “just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in again!”

Anne had suggested that I come to her polling place to vote. A recent innovation in election technology allows a voter to vote at any polling place in the county and not just the one that they are assigned. But there was a bad wreck on the highway. Anne had taken the car, so I wasn’t going to be on the highway anyway, but traffic was such a mess. I first learned of this accident by helicopter. The weather was nice enough that I had left the back door open and through it I heard the steady thump-thump-thump of a traffic copter that had parked itself above the nearby scene below. I biked to the polls. Crossing an overpass, I could see the accident site. It was on the headed downtown side of the road. The opposite side was flowing west, but so was the eastbound half of the highway. The police had turned around the cars trapped by the wrecks. I later learned that the accident involved a semi and a car. The driver of the car died.