This commentary is by Cate Phypers of Burlington.
The dregs of winter in Burlington can be brutal. It’s gray. It’s damp. What’s left of the snow is dirty and littered with fossilized fall garbage, surfacing for the first time since November. It can be isolating and lonely.
March 5 wasn’t any different. It was cloudy and cold. And raining to boot. But it was also Town Meeting Day, a 250-year-old Vermont tradition that occurs on the first Tuesday in March.
Across the state, more than 240 cities, towns and villages gather. They vote and debate their school budgets, next town councilors and every little town oddity in between. It is a time-honored tradition this state holds dear.
This is exactly how I found myself tying my sneakers and pulling my hood over my head to trudge through the drizzle to Ward 2’s polling place in the North End. As I walked through the doors of the elementary-school-turned-voting-grounds, I almost had butterflies. I had a sense of being a part of the elusive “something bigger.”
I waited in line to check in with the other K-P names behind another 20-something and an older man. As I waited, a mother walked in, carrying her baby and trailing a little girl behind her.
The girl’s cornsilk hair was done up in two wispy pigtails. Her blue eyes were round saucers as she took in what was clearly her own elementary school’s gymnasium, made over completely for voting day. Taped to her chest was a raindrop-speckled piece of lined paper, scrawled with the shaky letters of a toddler: “I’m voting for Emma!”
As the Grinch said, my heart grew three sizes seeing this little girl experiencing her first taste of local power. Her mom, who had been chatting with another woman she had run into, took her daughter’s hand and said, “See hun? This is why we get out and vote! We see our neighbors and our community!”
For the first time in many, many years, I felt patriotic. I felt proud to be there, casting my vote for the future. I felt proud to be standing among my peers, my neighborhood, my people. What a blessing it was, on this rainy March afternoon, to be exercising my right to democracy.
When I made my way to the makeshift voting booth, I thought of the tiny girl with her makeshift sign and I smiled. Because what is this country if not a makeshift, grass-rooted, homemade effort?
Later that evening, Emma Mulvaney-Stanak was elected as the first female and first openly queer mayor of Burlington.
Winter here can feel frozen, dreary and never-ending. It can feel like things will never get warmer — that things may never get better. But on Town Meeting Day, we chose hope.
