Who they are matters and not just because the question jazzes up our otherwise mundane lunch time weather and traffic patter. There are five of them, maybe our age, although they dress and look older. Rodney is skeptical of the over/under age game we play, says it’s the urban/rural split that accounts for the fashion difference, but then I ask what makes you think they are rural? We are in a Panera after all, next to a Five Guys and behind a Starbucks and down the street from a Walmart and across the street from a BP, so really, who is from anywhere anymore?

 

The women are carrying some over sixty weight, but not much. I imagine Zumba classes, but nothing like hot yoga or Orange Theory. They are happy and chatty, helping each other out as their buzzers light up and fussing over each other's utensils. Rodney suggests Christian ladies on break from their Pro-life yard sign campaigns, and I say open your eyes, man. One of them has a Patagonia sling bag and another is wearing a crystal amulet the size of a plum on a chain that belongs in a Hilary Mantel novel. And they are graying naturally.

 

And he says, open your eyes Madeleine, I bet you can buy Patagonia on Craig’s List and that for sure is a non partisan marketplace. And maybe the amulet is a hedge against the witches who roam the countryside killing babies. And check out their footwear. Those are Sketchers, and I say hey, Sketchers are expensive. And hip. Even the cool kids rock Sketchers.

 

Our dispute entices us to further investigate. We tilt our heads in their direction, trying to catch snippets of conversation for clues. We hear nothing of substance, a pronoun here or there, an active verb in the simple past tense. There are more “she”s and “her”s, and something about a house, maybe. Their speech is lively but not loud, and they seem to be listening to one another, taking turns talking. The amulet woman appears to have a lot to say. There’s an abundance of fleece. One woman sports a baseball cap with no helpful logo. Older, sensible, ordinary white folks. Nothing really to place them outside of this stretch of anywhere.

 

But it so happens that, despite the corridor of stateless franchiseland we are zooming through, this is not just anywhere. Here is a swing state and therefore critical. A swing state wracked by poisoned water and shut down curricula and redistricting mayhem.  Here is a place where election judges are the new VIPs, and wacky nobodies pop up as state reps like daisies along the roadside. Here is the place where, to hipster urban oldies like Rodney and I, people are willing to gamble the lives of their children on the preservation of the second amendment, child care begins at conception and ends at birth and former union jobs have been replaced by 27 hour minimum wage weeks at, well, at Five Guys, or Walmart.

 

Our women of Panera all have sleek smartphones which they nestle beside their lunches and the devices ping throughout the meal, causing talk to momentarily halt while the receiver relays the contents of her screen. Rodney and I both wonder quietly to each other about the content of those screens. Rodney murmurs a prayer against the power of Twitter. I think about Instagram photos where life is advertised as good, and if not good then fixable. Always fixable.

 

Likewise, I am cheered by the warmth of these women and turn away from Rodney’s doom talk. They seem so nice, I say and he says not likely in the voting booth. 

 

This is the demographic who vote: older, white women, having a midday meal on a Tuesday. The demographic who put Trump over the win line. Citizens with plenty of time to vote and campaign, to place yard signs and knock on doors. So who they are, these women with their Pick 2 lunches and their sleek smartphones pinging cheerily amongst the napkins and soup spoons on a crowded table top, who these women are matters.

 

We pass the women of Panera, on our way to bus our dishes and I chance a smile at one whose eye I catch. She smiles back and it occurs to me that we, in our Blundstones and our fashionably faded barn coats, our hybrid cars with blue state license plates, we might matter to them too.