We are sitting on the very edge of October before a full moon on Halloween, the time shift to evening darkness, and the election. I chaired a planning board meeting last night that could have been contentious but wasn't. I was ready with the words and gesture that Kamala Harris taught every woman who has ever been in a meeting: Mr. ____, I am speaking. We will be editing the board's bylaws written in 1994 since they reference newspapers and meeting places that no longer exist. I am pushing town to get a MailChimp account for a weekly email. In the week when the planning board meets, it will send out the permits to be discussed. The dustup over the Dunkin on Main Street has shown me how outdated our notification protocols are.

Outbreaks of Covid-19 at churches in Maine have pushed us into a danger zone. Some pastors need to spend time reflecting on their stupidity inside a jail cell. Same thing for the super spreader rallies for the criminal president. To be safe, we have closed the thrift shop until the covid numbers improve.

I'm reading Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times by Jonathan Sacks. He says we are undergoing the cultural equivalent of climate change. Here are a few quotes.

it’s the people not like us who make us grow.

Whatever its source, morality is what allows us to get on with one another, without endless recourse to economics or politics. There are times when we seek to get other people to do something we want or need them to do. We can pay them to do so: that is economics. We can force them to do so: that is politics. Or we can persuade them to do so because they and we are part of the same framework of virtues and values, rules and responsibilities, codes and customs, conventions and constraints: that is morality.

The perspective view is from the bridge over Sandy Stream. Colors are muted now, but there are still some warm glows near water. Two weeks from today is the election that decides if the U.S. has righted the ship or if we have slipped down a path to autocracy and fascism. Biden is heavily favored to win, but after 2016 we certainly do not trust polls. The Electoral College is just an invitation to game an election by directing hacking or disinformation to a few precincts in a few swing states. Given the Russian hacking and the right's voter suppression tactics and the unknowns of voting in a pandemic, there is no confidence in predictions. Could be a landslide, could be a squeaker. The first bill the new congress needs to pass is a package of comprehensive voting rights, including rules about number of polling places per capita. These ten hour lines of determined voters are heroic responses to voter suppression.

Brian built this Little Free Library that sits on the porch of the Good Steward. I registered it with the LFL people and it will go on a map of world wide LFLs. We have gone to a two day schedule at the thrift shop, but I am watching a covid outbreak in nearby Brooks carefully. If it gets worse, we will close for a few weeks.

The ride up to Greenville took us through Monson with its amazing General Store and Gallery in the middle of nowhere. It's all about the Appalachian Trail crossing there. Hikers stay overnight and stock up. Little towns like Monson are interesting because they have sustained visitors from the outer world that keep it from being too parochial and uninspired. On the way back we went from Abbott to Bingham on Route 16 past Kingsbury Lake. That road does not have telephone poles and wires, but it does have hills and curves that keep the views coming and big wind turbines up close and on the distant ridges.

The chicken and egg issue went away when MFT lowered the price on the building. Our offer is in and has to be approved by their board in a couple of days. I bought the domain unitypubliclibrary.org. When you do something for the third time, the pattern emerges and you get the bigger picture. We are building welcoming, non-partisan public spaces in our community.

My sisters and I are reading Octavia Butler's 1993 novel Parable of the Sower. I chose it after reading a couple of online articles about its timeliness and about how imagining a better future is essential to getting one and about how the power to imagine is as important as the power of critical thinking.

It is great to keep up with old friends and on the last day of summer we visited with Este at her cottage in Friendship at the end of a peninsula. Charming town and a small grocery store that reminded us of Artigue's in Abita Springs. Most of the lobster places are closed or have limited hours now, so we had sandwiches on her deck. Then suddenly it was fall with the earliest fall colors ever. Maybe that is because we are in a drought. Last Sunday we had breakfast in Farmington (a wonderful college town. I could live there) and headed northwest to Rangeley and circled the lake looking for something called Height of Land. The color was glorious. A wind storm yesterday probably took most of the leaves down along with our power. We did the generator drill and cut down two tree-sized branches that had fallen in our driveway. Pioneer women.