Pre-Election, Pause.

In the late afternoon, I walk down to the post office and empty my box of election flyers, adding to the recycling boxes in the lobby. The lobby’s a shabby space, with a metal Christmas tree strung with pink lights for Breast Cancer Awareness month and a box on a counter for respectful flag disposal. A few summers ago, the postmaster planted a garden in the strip of soil outside the squat brick building. In a weird kind of way, this seems like a micro collage of this country. That midmorning, when I arrived at the town clerk’s office, she’d received FBI warnings about election security, so many concerns about the grid going down.

The season’s first snow layers in among the remains of frost-killed summer. The light now is late fall — unfiltered by leaves, without the warmth of summer, but clear, penetrating. One of the autumn’s beauties are lingering twilights, the slow unfolding of the day into night.

Recovering, bit by bit, from a summer mold toxicity, I walk home the longer way, through the neighborhoods where kids have decorated houses with orange lights and ghosts on broomsticks. I pass the Legion and the gun store, and then walk along the river for a bit. I stop to talk with a dog walker about the declination of light. Do people do this in other parts of the world? Surely they must. We muse about the summer and fall — like a rare gift this season has been, suffused with growth and sunlight, as if in defiance of the human world.

And a relevant line from Ben Shattuck’s The History of Sound: “History is personal, even when it isn’t.”