Election Day Memories

The cattle ranch of my childhood was the polling place for our corner of Yavapai County. Perhaps thirty people came to our house in the Arizona desert each election day. A few days before the election my parents received their polling place supplies -- tiny American flags, sample ballots, actual ballots, sealing wax, the official ballot envelope which would be sealed with the wax when all of the registered voters had come to the ranch and left again to go to their ranches, quill type pens and bottles of ink -- all sorts of magical stuff. In preparation for election day, my mother baked cookies and my father raked the yard.
The election days of my childhood were magnificent. People who never came to our house came on those days for no reason other than the privilege of voting.
John and Frank Goodwin and Florence who was married to one of the two brothers crowded into the front of their pickup. One Armed Joe sometimes spent the entire day visiting with my father. Once he started to leave and my father reminded him that he'd come to vote. Old Mrs. Pickett came with her middle aged son who Mama said had tuberculosis. Oscar and Lillian were all business and never stayed to visit. Lillian always had something or other on the stove at home. Daddy sometimes said that it was probably one of our chickens. Mr. Kenny, who left his home in Kansas at age nineteen years because his doctor had told him he had one year left to live, arrived in his 1921 Dodge truck. I tried to always watch him crank the engine to start it after he had voted. Mr. Kenny lived to be 103 and voted in many elections before his year to live ended.
It wasn't easy for those people to come out of the desert mountains and vote and every election they showed up proud to be a part of the process.
My parents were serious, attentive business during the election days. There was no ballot tampering. Each one of those couple dozen votes was important. Polling place rules and procedures were strictly enforced by my parents.
After the elections, my brother and I got to keep some of the unused supplies -- the flags and the pens and the ink and the unused sealing wax and the sample ballots. For weeks after each election we practiced voting. We knew the sample ballots by heart. We sealed self made election envelopes with the heated wax.
For us on that isolated desert ranch, an election day was an event not to be missed. Those desert dwellers believed with all their hearts that their votes mattered. And they were never undecided.