Alissia Northrup and I pass through a room with multiple computers at parade rest and I recognize it at once, though it looks different from down here. It’s the room where the County Clerk and Registrar of Voters, Alissia, and her staff tally the votes each election night. I’m used to the perspective of the web stream, somewhere up near the margin of wall and ceiling; passing through the room at this angle feels funny, like being backstage, a kind of liminal sense that isn’t dispelled by the familiar anonymity of the conference room we enter. 

Alissia settles in a seat at the large table and I join her with my digital recorder. She has a message for Del Norte County voters. It’s written on the small piece of paper she’s holding. “I just want to tell the voters of Del Norte…” she begins. “You want me to do it now?”

Before I can answer, one of Alissia’s staff ducks a head in from behind the door. She presents a mangled mail-in ballot. “This person would like a replacement ballot,” the woman chuckles and holds the ballot up for Alissia’s official inspection. The end has been punctured repeatedly and perhaps slobbered on. “Her dog ate it.” 

“No fibbin’ on this one, huh?” Alissia laughs and leaves me to go replace the ballot. I look around the blank laminate room. The last time I was in this room I was with Jessica Cejnar-Andrews. We were interviewing Dr. Rehwaldt about why we all had to start shaking hands with our elbows. Funny how time works. 

“Sorry about that.” Alissia reappears, having successfully dealt with the canine ballot tampering, and picks up the thread of a thought she’d begun expressing on the phone earlier. “I have this…” she tells me, allowing her pause and matter-of-fact shrug to speak for her. “…for young people voting. I like to get young people volunteering at the polls. It’s good for them, but it’s good for us, it’s good for the community, seeing young people at the polls. I’ve had people say it gives them hope.” 

Continue reading Alissia Northrup Has Concerns – In Media Res →

There’s a handwritten sign on the door of the Gallery of Arts and Culture across H Street from the Post Office. Though the message it conveys is simple — a straight-forward designation of a future event’s time and place — if you peer through the glass, as I did, at the Gallery’s blank walls and empty shelves, the wastes of open cardboard boxes and bare track lighting, then the piece of yellow lined paper taped to the inside of the door tells an entire story. The note informs any interested passerby that the family of Barbara Burke will be holding an estate sale this weekend. 

Barbara passed away this past spring after a brief illness. “A brief illness” is obituary-speak for that final series of events that brings a person’s time on Earth to a close, and, as phrases go, it’s about as loaded as they come. For Barbara, it meant a growing sense of confusion, followed by a car accident serious enough to require hospitalization and rehab. While in the hospital, doctors found a pancreatic mass, which she decided — at age 84 — not to treat.

The last time I saw Barbara, she was sitting in a chair in the hallway outside her room in the assisted nursing facility. I’d been visiting someone else, and was in no way prepared to see Barbara’s swoop of preternaturally jet black hair in the institutionally gray hall. I stopped, wide-eyed. “Barbara?” At the sound of her name, Barbara looked up at me, and my heart broke a little.  

Continue reading Barbara Burke Loved You, Darling – In Media Res →