2021, animals, Art, Automotive, Gatherings, Kids, Stories, Uncategorized

Fair Joy

45 Comments

I know we talked about joy the other day, but… I want to talk about it again.

At the State Fair yesterday, a woman with two kids sat down next to me on the curb, waiting for the parade to begin.  The son was about 8 or so, the daughter was maybe 3.  She was adorable with bright blonde hair that curled around her face and the back of her neck.  She also had quite a dirty face – a combination of what looked like chocolate and something berry-ish. The berry stain had found a home on the front of her shirt as well.

The most interesting thing about this little girl was the fact that she was completely suffused with joy.  Everything about the parade was fascinating to her.  She couldn’t sit down, swaying and dancing as each band went by.  She ooh’ed and aaah’ed over the stilt walkers, the art cars, the waving princesses and especially the big bovines.  As each attraction reached us, she would turn to her mother, her face alight with pleasure, pointing out this newest discovery.

No matter how you measure it, nobody enjoyed the fair more yesterday than this toddler. 

When was the last time you got dirty (and enjoyed the process)?

45 thoughts on “Fair Joy”

  1. We get pretty dirty in the garden every weekend, especially when we were laying down newspapers as weed barriers and covering them with bags of top soil. We hope to get to the local stockyards this fall for a pickup load or two of their composted manure. That is pretty dusty work.

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      2. It is really nice composted manure, well aged and very weed free. It costs $25 for a pickup load, and the stockyard guy loads it for us with his Bobcat.

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  2. Rise and Wallow in the Mud, Baboons,

    Every year in the Spring, as we get the garden ready, I have a pigsty day in which I am covered with dirt and grime and I Am Happy. There were several days like that this Spring.

    Today I will get dirty, but I am not sure how much joy will be involved. I am sanding and removing the finish from a very old bookcase and next will refinish it for use. I doubt that I will approach the level of dirt pictured several days ago in “Having a Blast” with VS and tim. However, when the project is completed, then I will feel joy.

    So far on my vacation week I canned 3 gallons of tomato soup, and 2 dozen pints of wild plum and sour cherry jam. I am feeling utterly smug and ever so self-satisfied. It is a high self-esteem day. ☺️ 😇

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    1. Our tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers are reveling the cooler temperatures, making up for lost time in terms of ripening. This weekend we will make red enchilada sauce and more canned tomatoes. I splurged and ordered a Victorio electric food mill to strain and puree the tomatoes when I make tomato sauce. I think it will make it so much easier than cranking away with our manual food mill.

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  3. Cleaning up the aftermath of this disaster was a filthy job but “enjoyable”. After the water receded, the team I was on, drove up to Grand Forks each day for two weeks. Each day we cleaned out a home of destroyed items, removed carpets and cut out wet drywall. Much later, we went back to install new floors.

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      2. The 1997 flooding happened shortly after my mother died, so the two events are forever wedded in my mind. I’ll always remember the funny bits Garrison Keillor did about the floods, with a husband on the roof of his house as it drifts along in the water while his wife is on the nearby roof of the barn as it flows along.

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  4. My dirtiest time ever was June of 1991 when I created a hot-and-cold-running water system for our cabin, spending three days on my back in the crawl space beneath the cabin. I scooted around in the mud while assembling a Rube Goldberg assemblage of PVC pipes under the floor of the cabin. It rained a lot while I was on my back down there with all the spiders and dead mice. Since we didn’t have a water system, there was no way to take a shower after each day of work. I finally got so rancid and muddy that we drove to a nearby Ojibway reservation to pay them for using their facilities to clean up.

    The water system worked for about five weeks until October and cold temperatures came along. The water in the PVC pipe froze, shattering the plastic. As any fool should have predicted.

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  6. You have described my grand daughter perfectly when she was three, right down to curly blonde hair. She still has such joy. Finding it in first couple weeks of college.
    I am deep in dirt of another kind. No joy in it.

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    1. This child’s joy is still making me smile today. Maybe it’s because it’s been a traumatic 18 months? Or just because she was an absolute cutie!

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  7. I need to pick up on vs’s reference to stilt walkers. As my many stories about him reflect, my dad was a big figure in my life. He once told me he learned to use stilts when he was a kid.

    OK, but get this. The stilts were so high he couldn’t get on them in any usual way. He needed to lean them up against his house, then go up the stairs to his bedroom. Wriggling out of his second story bedroom window, my dad would get in the stilts and walk off. Sheesh!

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  8. Is that an actual photo of the girl at the parade?? It’s a great photo anyway.
    I get dirty a lot… I’m not sure I ever thought about “enjoying” the process…

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    1. Is a farmer ever clean? Yes. At mealtime.
      My limited mealtime with farmers and limited working farming always included cleaning up. Even when meals were brought out to the field, dirty hands were not allowed.

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        1. Ha! You got that right.
          Kelly doesn’t have anything to do with my mudroom… She may put her boots on in there but it’s my bathroom. And my egg cleaning room. When my folks built the house, Dad had a sink, shower, and toilet in there. I never used the shower (because I had a bathroom and shower downstairs. When the house was built, there was 4 kids in the house. There are advantages to being the youngest; I got my own bathroom eventually.)
          Kelly and I remodeled the mudroom a few years ago. Took out the shower and put in a utility sink (with an hand held shower sprayer; useful for washing the dog, rinsing eggs, ect plus having 2 water sources for extra quick sink filling!). Plus a one of a kind sliding mirror because there was no where to put it otherwise. Our friend Angus is a cabinet maker, So the mirror is on a track and I slide it over behind a cabinet when not being used, and pull it over in front of the sink (and window) when I need it.

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    3. No this is not a picture of the girl from the fair. Somehow I thought I might be stepping over the creepy line if I turned this woman said “can I take a picture of your daughter for my blog?” It did take me about 25 minutes to find this picture though – doing searches using various key words, on a couple of free photo sites. YA was giving me grief about it. The fact that this little girl had paint all over her was a bonus — it was the look on her face that made me choose the picture.

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        1. Yeah, I thought that too. But I wasn’t sure what the girl in the picture is covered in. Paint was not obvious to me.

          A few years ago in a photography class, we talked about taking pictures of people in public and how that’s ok. But then the teacher said to me “YOU do not take pictures of kids on playgrounds.”

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  9. i took ari to the fair yesterday but had a doctors appt at 2 so we needed to leave at 1

    he was having such a great he kept yelling more … every step of the way

    animal barns kids rides strawberry malt
    hot dog, more with an exhuberence of joy

    he faded at 1 just 4 hours in and i had to give him a shoulder ride to the car to get to my doctors appt

    my daughter called last night and said she took the day off to take them again today

    i was able to take the morning off and join them daughter and ari (3 years old) and denver (9 months) and a sponge who inhaled the surrounding events

    did the quickest tour ever of the art exhibit and ran into linda

    the fair brings out natural rapture
    animals food rides people watching overhead wonders off to the left the right

    i suppose it’s true everywhere with these guys they are very special kids but at the fair it’s like being bombarded with wonder

    going again monday am

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  11. Our cat is joyous tonight, and is perched on the arm of the Stickley chair in the livingroom trying to catch her tail. She only does this when she is in high spirits.

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