A Contented Sunday in the Real America

I love the winter vegetables. After I took the photo above, I put that butternut squash in the oven, baked it with the Farmer's Market Chicken for an hour, and took it out and started nibbling on it while sitting at the kitchen table working on a writing project. It's an overcast autumn day here, the back yard burnished with gold leaves from the little maple that has almost doubled in size since Ted and I bought this place. Gus/Joey has decided to take a nap on the table next to the laptop, and I can hear him purring loudly as I type. He idly lifts his head up only when the gusty wind scares up a stick or two, but he never stops purring. Knowing that Obama and his crew will be running the country, this weekend feels mellow -- a break from anxieties which will surely return. But for now, it still feels good, as Frank Rich wrote in his New York Times column today. Here's how he concluded the essay:

The actual real America is everywhere. It is the America that has been in shell shock since the aftermath of 9/11, when our government wielded a brutal attack by terrorists as a club to ratchet up our fears, betray our deepest constitutional values and turn Americans against one another in the name of “patriotism.” What we started to remember the morning after Election Day was what we had forgotten over the past eight years, as our abusive relationship with the Bush administration and its press enablers dragged on: That’s not who we are.

So even as we celebrated our first black president, we looked around and rediscovered the nation that had elected him. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Obama said in February, and indeed millions of such Americans were here all along, waiting for a leader. This was the week that they reclaimed their country.