Gone Fishin'

Farmers' Country Fairs




Every August our local grange holds a farmers' fair mostly geared toward 4-H-er’s but with something for everyone, including country bands, carnival rides, magic acts, puppet shows, tractor exhibits, and tents filled with vendors from local landscapers, gutter specialists, spas and whirlpools, furniture makers, county service divisions, and even democrats and republicans.

I look forward to seeing the cows, calves, heavy horses, pigs, sheep, goats, chickens, geese, rabbits, flowers, vegetables, and the photography, painting, and craft exhibits the most. I have to go on the first day before the grass gets all crushed and smelly, the agricultural hall is full of wilted and molding specimens, and the weather fouls things up.


I could sit in the cow barn all day. I’m jealous of the children clomping around in their wellies, strands of straw sticking out of their hair, leading reluctant or completely nonchalant barnyard critters to and fro, from stall to judging ring to grooming area. I love the smells, the rolling eyes, swishing tails, and occasional bellows. Billy goats butt heads through the fencing, or sleep in heaps. Pigs squeal and burp and roll in their dirt. Roosters crow and hens scratch saw dust out onto passers by.
I try not to think of how lovely they taste as I watch a quail hen poke around her cage. Droopy eared rabbits chew carrot sticks and temp children to poke their fingers into their cages to pet them, even though the signs say not to. The sheep barn usually smells the worst and we hurry through, pausing only to pet those who look like they want it, and stand in line at the end of the row to wash our hands of lanolin and sheep spit.


The row of stalls relegated to the Belgian draft horses from A Better Way Farm is my favorite place. We meet Duke and Doc, both 11 years old and 1900-2000 pounds. Captain and Cutter are happy to have their noses rubbed. Cutter weighs 2200 pounds! I look at their feet and wonder how easy it is to keep yours out from under them.
I so want a barn full of them myself. Steel-toed boots, check. But they eat more hay a day than I could even afford, much less carry. When I lived in Ohio for a couple of years and drove to Michigan in the summers, I passed hours worth of Amish farm fields dotted with draft horses, plowing fields or grazing peacefully with their young.

The photography exhibit is exceptional, as usual. I am amazed at the types of photos children have taken and the Kodak moments they didn’t miss. There’s a cicada emerging from his shell, a picture of a happy dog hanging out the back window taken through the side mirror with “objects are closer than they appear” printed across his image, ears blowing back and tongue hanging out in sheer delight. Other pictures are of birds, and buildings, and landscapes, and people. Charcoal, water color, and acrylic drawings and paintings line the walls from top to bottom, some unbelievably detailed, others delightfully abstract.

In the building dedicated to horticultural projects, sunflowers rise to the ceiling, bales of hay, straw and alfalfa waft their sweet scents, zinnias, glads, dahlias and roses droop and fade in jars of clouding water, still hinting at their original beauty. Red, blue, yellow, and white ribbons flap in the breeze, bestowing the level of glory and pride their cultivators can boast. There aren’t as many weird anomalies in the vegetable section this year, the zucchini’s are impressive considering it’s been so rainy this summer that everyone’s zucchini pretty much gave up and went to mush. Not a bad year for peppers and tomatoes, potatoes and horseradish, garlic and onions. The habaneros look dangerous, the wine grapes delicious.






Nothing unusual in the canning division but we want to sample them all. The cakes all look too cute to eat. Astonishingly beautiful quilts, blankets, and needlepoints hang from the rafters. Posters on bee keeping, changing the oil in a lawn mower, a study one budding young scientist conducted to see which toys all the neighborhood dogs like best complete with analytical charts and graphs (and a surprise—the ball didn’t win!). We’re too tired by now to read them all and make notes-to-self to hit that barn earlier next year, before our feet wear out. I'm always grateful that local children and parents are still into agriculture, horticulture, crafts, and animal husbandry when so much has changed in life and so many things compete with these for their time.


Now it’s off to the food stands for corn on the cob, lemonade, pulled pork sandwiches, French fries, and good cold soft custard. Or crab cakes, grilled chicken, and peach pie. The other big reasons for the annual trek through the Grange fair. You gotta have some fair food every summer!

Sometimes my cup just runneth over

Today I was giving the dog a tour of the back yard and my eye was caught by movement around the butterfly bush that was different from the staggery flight of the pollen-laden bumblebee. I looked up into the flowers and spied a hummingbird moth. I keep an eye out for them every summer because they’re fascinating little things. They look like shrimp with wings. Their see-through wings beat like the hummingbirds’—invisibly. I jump up and down and clap my hands like a child when they arrive.




I looked toward the deck, and a male ruby throated hummingbird was dueling for space with two bumblebees and several yellow jackets. Other hummingbirds were checking every bud on the cardinal flowers. I looked down at the dog lolling in the grass and a damsel fly was sunning itself on his back. When I leaned over to pet him, a katydid landed between my feet, gave its face a wash, and zipped away again. This one (photo) got into the kitchen one evening as I was checking food doneness on the grill. It took me a while to find it even after it started singing. Luckily I was able to catch and release it outside without damaging its big lime-colored wings. They’re pretty noisy at night, and a night in the house would probably have killed it, if not driven me nutts.



This praying mantis was as curious about me as I was him last year. I saw several babies earlier this season, but have yet to see an adult. They usually hang out on my deck and front porch closer to fall, so there’s time yet to tell whether they’re making it. When I had my roof replaced 5 years ago, I was in a panic about the survivability of the praying mantises living in the front garden as men pitched shingles and old wood from the roof into a dumpster for two days. At one point, I ran out of the house waving my arms, shouting wait! wait! to people who really didn’t speak much English, but they paused long enough for me to scoop one up and provide it safe passage to a neighbor’s garden. I imagine the roofers were all shaking their heads behind my back as I gingerly carried him across the lawn, but they seemed to work a little more carefully after that, perhaps so I wouldn’t find any crushed “pets” after they left. (I had asked them on the first day to beware of the toads under the front bushes and the baby snakes under the back bushes, never sure they knew what I meant.)

Last night on our last outing of the day, the dog was very interested in something in the grass, so I trained my flashlight on the spot and there was a cicada nymph trying to traverse the dew-wet blades, obviously just out of the ground and looking for a place to molt its shell. I’ve only ever seen their shell skeletons hanging from the hosta flowers in the morning, but if you go to Wikipedia, you can watch one from Ohio emerge in sped-up time and listen to recordings of their "singing." I went to a meeting in Chicago last time the 17-year locusts were hatching and had never and hope to never experience anything like that again! Outdoors, you could not have a conversation without shouting as loud as you could, and you could not walk far without stepping on them no matter how hard you tried. But I am nostalgic for their buzzing noise by the time summer comes and keep a shiny cicada popper lure in my fishing tackle box for enticing bass on warm summer evenings.

As I kept the dog on a taught leash away from the struggling bug (not easy to do leaning over in the dark with a flashlight), I thanked him for finding it for me and wished it wasn’t too dark to take a picture of the prehistoric-looking thing, all the more creepy in the middle of the night.

These photos were taken by me. Please do not use or duplicate in any manner.

Is this Iowa?

No, this is heaven, Kevin Costner’s character in Field of Dreams would say.

I thought I’d probably like Iowa, Iowa City anyway, but I didn’t know I was going to love it! A friend and I met there to take a writing course (two, in her case) at the Iowa Writer’s Group Summer Writing Festival. It was awesome. We stayed with her daughter (poet, double MFA, and co-director of the summer program) and her boyfriend (poet and teacher). The accomodations? A house that belongs to the state poet laureate (not in residence at the time). I know little about him but liked the love poems he had framed in the guest room. We didn’t get much down time, didn’t cook once, and raced off to bed as soon as we got in every evening so there wasn’t even time for sitting around and talking.

We did learn a lot. Without going into details, our class staged a coup after just two hours on the first day, and everything went up hill from there. We all walked out on the second day with our own blogs and our heads full of ideas. That was quite a feat for some of us, who’d not spent much time looking at blogs, much less reading them, who until shortly before the class may have heard the word, but hadn’t a clue what it meant. So, voila, as they say. This is the result!


But, getting back to Iowa. That—is now a goal. Growing up in the Midwest (but adulthooding in Pennsylvania), the open space was such a relief. I try to explain to people when they visit Michigan with me, or when I recently returned from the plains, what it’s like to see around, to not have your vision blocked in by buildings, strip malls, billboards, or even lovely tree-lined roads and hills. What freedom it is to see nothing but fields that end in the curve of the earth, roads that go on straight for days, miles upon miles of layers and layers of clouds. The first time a former boyfriend flew into Michigan with me he couldn’t get over the long, straight roads that occasionally crossed others but never deviated from their straightness as far as the eye could see from a plane!



Back on the ground, you can drive for miles before going through a small town, where even the youngest people can remember when the only stop light or sign was erected. If you blinked and missed it, you find yourself passing a farm way off in the distance or on the very verge, depending on when the road was put in, or a roadside stand with homemade signs for homemade pies, homegrown fruits and vegetables, real canned goods, and crazy mixed bunches of flowers that you never would squish into one vase at home but can’t resist buying even though it will make you sneeze once it’s trapped in the house (not to mention the resident bugs that inevitably will decide to explore their new home).

Living on the east coast, you are surrounded by really old stone buildings and homes. The Midwest has buildings almost as old, but the architecture and the feel are totally different. I love the big, square brick or wood-sided houses with big long porches, cupolas, peaked roofs (called ruffs), and odd-sized windows. The towns are adorable, with Victorian and Georgian style homes all mixed in. I love the towns, with their old Western movie style storefronts, public parks, quaint little shops, crooked frost- and tree-root-heaved sidewalks, holiday decorations and parades, and children playing OUTSIDE. I love how the farmhouses are surrounded by a copse of shady trees, barely visible from the road, while the barns and silos loom large, shiny, and proud.

In the Midwest, freight trains go on forever. I mean, forget curfews if you’re on the wrong side of the tracks (my parents will appreciate that pun!). After spending years—ok, months—waiting in a car for stopped or slow moving trains, I once was trapped by one in Kalamazoo right near the engine, which had just barely closed off the road. While I sat there fuming about how I was going to be late for work, listening to the incessant clanging of the crossing bells, I watched the engineer climb down the steps, cross the tracks, and walk into a 7-11. I kid you not! I was too incredulous to be mad after that! Of course if you were with a boyfriend, he’d shut the engine off and we’d steam up the windows while we were waiting for the train to moan and squeal and jolt itself back into slow motion as inexplicably as it groaned to a labored, indefinite stop.




It’s interesting in the Midwest how towns are often quite hilly. The center of everything—banks, food stores, gas stations, pharmacies, party stores (you have to be from the Midwest to know what that is, don’t you?)—often seems to be on the only high, curvy, and interesting, ground around. I’m sure there is some historical explanation that has to do with flooding or goes back to our European heritage where castles and walled villages were built on hills because of the vantage point factor. There was time, of course, when Midwesterners had to defend themselves against the Indians from whom they stole the land, or the Confederate soldiers from the South, or whatever.

Anyway, I can’t wait to get back to Iowa, and all the surrounding states, with time to explore. I just dipped my toe in this time, but there’s a cannonball into the back roads and cities alike in my future. I need time to see what plants grow, bugs crawl, fish swim, birds fly, and dreams accumulate next trip.


The photos in this post were taken by me from either a speeding car or landing airplane. Please do not duplicate or use in any manner.