Work-in-Progress Wednesday: More Reverie, Ch. 29

I’m so close to finishing Reverie, y’all.

And I also woke up to the good news that Roy Moore lost in the special election in Alabama! (* non-Americans: see explanation below)  What-what!

When the national news had been reporting that “anything can happen in this election,” I thought to myself, They don’t understand.  This is Alabama.  I watched the news interview Alabama voters who touted Moore as a man with “good Christian values.”  The cynic in me felt hopelessly bitter about my adopted home of the Deep South.

But then Alabama voters shocked me by electing Doug Jones.

Proof once again that there is hope for the South.  Proof once again that the “love” part of my “love-hate relationship” with the South is justified.  Proof that people understand what “good Christian values” actually means.

I know it seems like it doesn’t have anything to do with Reverie, but it does to me, because Reverie is a book firmly rooted in that love-hate relationship I have with the South.  It’s a lot about my own southern nostalgia, but includes plenty of southern darkness.

In celebration, I want to include a segment from the tail-end of Reverie.  I’m carefully picking out a section that doesn’t include any spoilers, which is hard to do with this particular book.  Anyway, here ya go:

Maybe Lucinda’s sick, and Ardie should say something.

On the other hand, sometimes what people call “sick” is just a person’s way of slowly getting better.  Like how PTSD nightmares are the brain’s way of trying to process what it saw.  Or how a fever is the body’s way of trying to kill off an infection.

Except sometimes fever will kill you before the infection does, Ardie reminds herself.

“Ardie?” Lucinda says.  “Are you alright?  You look kind of… wound up today.”

Ardie forces a smile.  “I s’pose I am wound up.  Spent all day yesterday getting the shop ready for the storm, but can’t really know if we did a good enough job or not until after it blows through.  Spent all morning up in Sumter, going from Walmart to Home Depot tryin’ to get everything I needed to prep the house and now your place.”

Lucinda’s face falls.  “I’m sorry.  I shouldn’t’ve let you do all this for me.  I coulda asked somebody else, like Dan.”

“No, ma’am, don’t start on that again.  I told you before — it’s not imposing if I’m the one who volunteered to do it.”

* Note for non-American and politically apathetic American readers:  Donald Trump chose a Republican Alabama Senator to be his Attorney General, the somewhat possum-like old racist Jeff Sessions (see Saturday Night Live clip below).  Because Sessions’ senate seat was now empty, the state held a special election to replace him.

The Republican candidate was a man named Roy Moore, a hard-right evangelical Christian with a tendency to say things like September 11th was punishment from God for homosexuality and other liberal shortcomings, or that life was better before the Civil War, even though we still had slavery.  Doug Jones was his moderate Democrat rival.

Moore’s campaign went haywire when women began to step up and say that he’d hit on them, dated them, or assaulted them when he was in his thirties and they were in their teens.  While in another state that might basically automatically lose the election for him, this is Alabama, and such accusations didn’t appear to be sticking.  At least, not with all voters.  Fortunately, they stuck after all.  And Moore lost.

And now for a window into Attorney General Jeff Sessions, via the lampooning, left-leaning show Saturday Night Live, a la Forrest Gump: