Winter
Jen Silverman again, closing in like a hard dusk. It is November of 2020. They’re counting the votes and whatever lies ahead is a prediction we have all made in so many different ways in the past twenty-four hours. Yesterday morning we drove up the Taconic, and the leaves had turned burgundy and brown, a quieting down of October’s eager crimson and orange. I’ve never owned a house before. I never thought I could own anything. When I imagined myself as older than I was, I was always alone and I was always in an airport. This house is a farmhouse from the 1800s, renovated to hold out the cold, to fill itself with light. Sometimes I wonder what it saw, when it imagined itself into the future. Burly New England farmers filling its flanks, perhaps, not something like me. Would it even have looked at me and known what I was? Not-man not-woman, or not quite, not enough, with my hair lopped badly and my sleeve of tattoos and no skirt, no apron, anywhere in sight. We pull into the gravel driveway; it is afternoon; dusk not yet here, light bouncing off the East-facing windows; and the votes are being counted. Reflection is something that a lot of people have said they’re trying to use this time to do more of. I am trying to do less. I am trying to see my self nowhere. I am trying to understand the firm boundaries between individual and community. It is hard to parse the relationship between self and community without dwelling on the