By james art 
Shortly before the presidential election, on Sunday morning, the door was ringing. I thought my husband was returning from a trip outside the city and signaling that he was at home.
I opened the door of a small woman who asked me if we could talk. I stepped on the front porch.
She said she visited the Baptist Church in the neighborhood of our central Topeka neighborhood of Topeka. She noticed many signs of Kamala Harris in the neighborhood – 20 according to my censuses, against three for Donald Trump – and said that it was angry. She said she had decided she had to talk to people to understand why they support Harris-Byden.
Harris-Wolz, I corrected it before I added, “Because it’s pragmatic.”
“What does that mean?” She asked.
I turned my eyes before I said, “Practical.”
She said she was brought up as a witness to Jehovah and described herself as a Christian.
“I think Trump is evil,” I said.
She said he was a “sinner”, but he redeemed. “Haven’t you sinned?” She caused.
“Of course,” I said, asking her to leave my porch.
As he was leaving, I asked if he was planning to vote for Trump. She said yes. I said that in my opinion, if she was a Christian, she voted for the “antichrist”.
She said she had thought so before, believing the “lies” of the media. I told her I was a freelance writer, so part of the media.
I went inside irritated. After a while, my phone rang. He was my neighbor. She warned me not to open the door if it was ringing. “Too late,” I said.
We compared our experience. When Trump’s supporter asked my neighbor, who also had a Harris sign in her yard, for her support for the Vice President, she said she supported Harris because of her position on reproductive rights. I congratulated my neighbor for sticking to politics.
I was not proud of how I dealt with this woman in front of my door. Did I have to ask her more questions? Yes, but instead I let her go under my skin. At one point, she even said, “I see that you can be angry too.”
A week after the election, my husband and I went to Massachusetts, where his brother lives in Beverly, on the north coast, half a mile from the Atlantic. On a morning walk, I saw an interesting looking person with my dog looking at the ocean.
Risk, I said, “A wonderful day, despite everything.” He laughed and we chatted. He said he saw us as something like a “scientific experiment” after Trump’s re -election, suggesting that everyone would just see what would happen.
A few days later, my husband and I saw the same light black man who introduced himself as Pierre. He described how he grew up on a dairy farm near Ann Arber, Michigan, with eight sisters. He said his family was not stigmatized, but was always treated as special. He described himself as an “eternal optimist”.
It works remotely from Massachusetts in production. He said he was talking to his neighbors about our previous meeting, mistakenly reporting that we were Oklahoma. He noted that Oklahoma is a state where every county votes for Trump, creating a meme comparing it to a massachusetts that votes as much blue as the Oklahoma votes red.
I fixed it on my home state, saying that Harris had won several counties in Kansas and that Trump had won our district, Shonny, with only 31 votes. Despite the conventional belief, I told him, Kansas is not a red monolith.
Imagine my joyful surprise when I did a little survey the other day to find that Harris actually won in Shonny County in the end result. I saw this first in Politico and decided that the publication accidentally turned the votes. But on November 11, The Kansas City Star reported informal results showing that the Democratic Party’s ticket was won in Shawney County. Kansas’s interactive map of the New York Times is currently showing showney County as a light blue, not purely azure, but enough son, with Harris ahead of Trump with 407 votes.
I can’t tell you how happy I was to understand this – another proof that Kansas is not a completely red rectangle. At least somewhere I was in a fragile majority, not in the minority of Shoni’s columns, which included the confident Baptist on my threshold.
Obviously, it is easier to talk to people who agree with us. On the other hand, I accidentally talked to a stranger, which brought pleasure and mutual discovery. On the other side of the political division, I did not do so well.
Next time I’ll try more.
Jeffrey Ann Gudie is a N Award -winning freelance writer and a book critic whose work was published in The Boston Globe, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Kansas City Star and The Kansas Reflector, among many other publications. She lives in Topeka.