At the risk of sounding a little like Charles Dickens, it was the best of shifts, it was the worst of shifts, depending upon your perspective. A required employee meeting chewed up almost two hours of our time, but starting late was only one part of the problem.

As I neared the nursing station, some things looked rearranged, I thought housekeeping was doing heavy duty cleaning. But that usually didn't entail moving more than sixty patients' medical charts somewhere else.They were nowhere around. Then I noticed most of the stations' chairs were gone, and buckets of icky looking stuff setting around, and rolls of carpet stuck out in places you wouldn't want a child to play on, and certainly not eighty to ninety plus year old patients to walk around.

Records and forms and nursing care helps looked like they weren't stacked anywhere, but had landed wherever somebody tossed them. Phones were rearranged in places hard to get to quickly. In the halls workmen were installing new carpet. As they slathered sticky stuff on the floor with tools that looked like giant pancake flippers, it reminded me of a children's story character and his blue ox, Babe, greasing a giant griddle to make their pancakes on.

But I quickly returned to the reality of getting patients to and from the dining room for supper, and trays to those who stayed in their rooms, and doing baths, and how I could give medicines before the patients fell asleep.

I trudged down the hall, careful to not step in the way of the workers, and knocked on the room of a lady I thought may be German. Other times I've been in her room, I've noticed she has a small red, white and blue miniature stuffed elephant that is waving an American flag. She seems happy someone takes time to be with her, so I ask how she feels about the election, and a torrent of emotion surprises me.

"I come from Germany,", she says, "A long time ago". Her teeth seem to be closer together. It is like they bite down to hold a thought as she speaks. "We lost everything. They took everything." She stops for a moment, and I worry she is over tired, but she's only remembering. "We had a fine home, and a summer home, with a lake, and cars. And we had money.Somehow we get to America, a place called Tennessee", She gets very quiet. Her teeth and her shoulders relax, then she looks at her little stuffed elephant who is still flag waving, and smiles at me. "In America we vote" she says, and her words erase my concerns about getting through the shift, or how our country will be. "In America we vote."