I woke up this morning before the alarm clock went off, and in that kind of half dreamy state, images from the movie “The Wizard Of Oz” surfaced in my brain.

Oddly, this has been a recurring theme for me this week. When the numbers were looking good for Obama, the lyrics, “Ding, dong, the witch is dead,”  kept coming to mind. Today, post-election, I feel like Dorothy did in the movie’s final scene: home again, in a place I used to know and love.

As I said to my husband last night, I didn’t fully realize how alienated I’d been feeling, politically speaking, until yesterday, when things turned around, and suddenly, it seemed to me I was in the right country again, a place where the predominant values and ideals are consistent with my own.

A whole lot of us have been feeling like this for years, like Dorothy and Toto did in Oz: strangers in a strange land. It’s great to wake up today and feel good about America again, to say with certainty that there’s no place like home.