I never paid a poll tax. I’m thankful the days of paying to use the voting place are gone. But I’ll admit that I have found it emotionally taxing to vote in Maine, ever since I moved here a few years ago. All of that changed last Tuesday, and not for the reasons that may leap to mind.

It was not due to the ballot itself. After using the kind of voting machines in which the vote is registered by means of pulling a big handle that also opened the booth’s curtain, the Magic Marker and paper ballot seemed charmingly old-fashioned, and the process of feeding my ballot into a box myself felt curiously confidence-inspiring.

It was not an example of valuing voting rights. My seventh-grade teacher’s passion for democracy, and her detailing the horrors women endured to win the right to vote have stayed with me. Call me nerdy – or preferably, patriotic – when I say I consciously thank the suffragettes every time I enter a voting booth.

It was not a case of caring about the election results. Although, like so many of my neighbors, I felt more personally invested in this election than I had ever felt in my lifetime, caring about which candidates would prevail is nothing new to me.

It was not a question of inconvenience. In fact, until this year, it has always been quicker to cast my ballot in Rockland than it ever was in New York state, where I was a young voter, or in the Boston suburbs, where I voted for many years. No doubt even the 45-minute wait I incurred by voting as the polls opened in Rockland was less lengthy than waits would have been in my very populous, former home states.

In fact, it was the very wait itself that finally wiped out the emotionally taxing feeling that formerly overcame me at the Maine polls. That’s because it allowed me to look around me. That’s thanks to some neighbors signaling “hello” to me, to some others stepping out of line to chat a moment or give me a quick hug. It’s a result of one Rockland woman hovering at the exit to walk out with me when our voting was done.

They didn’t know it, but these Rockland residents vetoed the emotional tax I used to pay. For three years, I always felt a wave of homesickness when it came time to vote. That’s because – sited in a school, firehouse or similar community center – the polls are the ultimate community experience. At the Rockland recreation center, I used to feel a pang because my children never played there. I felt new and unknown, watching longtime residents meet and greet. But this time, thanks to a longer line filled with more familiar faces, my neighbors finally exorcised the ghosts of polling places past.