The Boone County Fair marks the end of summer and the beginning of school. When I was teaching at NIU, I felt pressure to finish my syllabus during fair week. Hell week, a week of meetings busting with jostling between colleagues–would follow. The social dynamics of our work group were not happy, even though our boss picked parks for our meetings.Â
Since I’ve retired, I’ve nearly forgotten how horrible those weeks were, though the memory echoes. The days are visibly shorter. We walk out in the evening the sun dropping behind the horizon earlier and rising later. It’s easier to sleep with less light slamming our hallway. All summer Bruce has left the TV to watch the sun fall. We’ve found a few painted lady butterflies knocked down on the road.  The moon rises quickly off the horizon. There are few specks of fireflies. They seem to be hanging around later this year. My friend the redwing blackbird has disappeared. The year is falling toward winter.
The first day I walked through the Fair gates, we hurried to the Home Economics building to see how we did with our entries. I enter photographs and Bruce enters a woodwork project, lately a Christmas ornament, and apple butter and blackberry jam. For all the pictures I entered this year, I earned a fourth place. Most of my pictures are placed on the bottom of the boards, though I have won in the past. And Bruce earned a blue for each of his, because he is the craftsman in our house.
When we walked through the crowds, crossing through the giant farm implements, a giant spray machine with arms that looked like they spanned an acre, I felt the hollow spaces of all the people who are not here. There’s grief when you’ve been to the same event for forty years, an event like a survey stake, that pins the corner of the years together. You see people you knew as children, now adults with their own families. You see their parents’ white hair, faces deep lines and gait stiff, supported by a cane and you realize that’s us, though Bruce and I aren’t parents.
Years past it seemed the fair was about our parents–the generation that was a buttress to ours, a bulwark against mortality. Once they slipped away, we were next, we were the elders, the old folks. I’d dread seeing Bruce’s mom who gave me a thrill of fear because I never knew what she would say or if I’d be met by the cold shoulder. We’d see Marion and Reynold watching the draft horses. They were the first people outside his mother that Bruce introduced me to, who were his second parents after his father died.  We chatted with Jane Johnson who was a very close friend of Bruce’s mother, who became my close friend, when we helped Bruce’s mom in the last months of her life, Jane who was with her when she died. Jane and Marge were on again, off again friends through the years, who was present to the end. I learned how it can be with good friends—close, then not close, then close again when it mattered. I learned how good friends survived backstabbing. But now I won’t find them standing by the draft horse show or eating chicken or pork chops at the Grange.
Like other Saturdays at the fair we stood at the fence and watched the horses. These years we don’t get there in time to watch the six horse hitch because they hitch first thing in the morning, and I am slow to wake up. But we found Bruce’s former boss and his wife in the same place Marion and Reynold used to stand and began a long conversation about our lives while the horses changed harness from the three horse unicorn hitch to the end of the competition two horse hitches.
We sat with Mr. Peterson’s son, Kenny, on the last day, Sunday, and talked about those things a son must deal with when the last of his parents have gone. There was talk of lawyers, and land, and cleaning out the house–the beloved humor of odd things left–and the precious memories laid over memorabilia. We often ran into his parents at the grange, a few years ago, both of them getting around with a “go go”, one of those scooters elderly people use to manage distances they can no longer walk. Before Mr. P died Kenny had brought his father’s “go go” to his room.
Some people have been a bright thread, this being the only time we visit in person. The fair is full of strangers but there are enough people we know from the community that it feels like a neighborhood, though not like it was forty years ago. Â
Walking past the livestock barns, cattle, swine, sheep, I noticed women wearing dresses, as if going to the fair was a hot date. To my mind, it was just hot, and humid, my clothes soaked by the time we walked out. I also remembered my first formal date with Bruce. We stood under a tree in moonlight while I tried to talk him out of choosing me, but he answered every resistance. And my body rolled in lyrical waves pulled like the ocean dances with the moon. We set a date for the fair because he wanted to show me the draft horses. My heart was lifted up by the power of the draft horses pulling shiny show wagons painted white, green, red, blue. I almost raised my hands in praise. That day he took me home to his mother who was cleaning house and put off in a sweet way that he’d not warned her I was coming. She knew that I was the one. So did her dog, who bit me, while Bruce opened the door to go inside because the dog knew I would pull him out of her house, that I would bring the grief of a mother letting go.
And then there was the time, two years into my marriage with Bruce, I began to understand why his mother called the Boone County Fair a vacation. I’d been there before, walked around and looked at the exhibits. My feet hurt, it was dusty, the animals smelled. But that year I’d lived here two years, long enough to know some of the exhibitors. That made all the difference. I saw what Marge meant. I found community and for a week became a part of the best that small town living has to offer. You’d walk along and run into someone from church or the neighborhood, stand and catch up long enough for your legs to stiffen.
 It was the summer my brother died, when I needed to walk away from my grief. It wasn’t so much talking to people about my pain and frustration as it was being with them, watching the animals, being a part of a yearly ritual that for us became forty years old. The Fair has is been running for 169 years but the Grange has run it since 1957. When Bruce was a boy he attended it over at Spencer Park. In the commercial building he chatted with a gentleman who sells fudge, the smell fills that corner of the building. He said he’d been coming to the fair since it was held at Spencer. Its current location is off Highway 76 on 153 acres just north of Belvidere. The Granges of Boone County own it. According to Boone County’s Page Fair History,
“We will have about 3,000 head of livestock, everything from rabbits to draft horses and 6,000 non-livestock entries, everything from quilts to corn to cakes to photos. Our superintendents do an outstanding job promoting participation in their various departments..
“Plus it’s a place where people from the city can learn about agriculture. They can see a cow being milked, a chick being hatched, a sheep being sheared, and a team of six draft horses being hitched to a wagon. It’s all up close and personal and they can ask the farmer or rancher questions. And the farmer or rancher will be more than happy to answer. It’s probably more important than ever that people understand where their food comes from and how it’s raised. A place where you can see agriculture in action, firsthand.
“The Boone County Fair is also a grand social event, a once a year six day community family reunion. Where you can just go and sit and see old friends and make new ones.”
It was like entering a religious pageant that cleansed, refreshed, and entertained at the same time. Â
That year, I held one of those giant draft horses while the Buerkleys hitched them one by one to the show wagon. Their power lifted me up. These are no gentle giants. Our love for draft horses was born, but they were too much horse, too big, too spirited, for us. When we met a friend’s Norwegian Fjord we saw a smaller horse that could do it all-draft work, driving, riding. We subscribed to Small Farmers Journal and dreamed about owning a small self sustaining farm. Since we lived in town, we had no hope for moving to the country, until twenty years later, when Bruce’s mom went home to be with the Lord and we bought our farm. It was at the Boone County Fair I called to go look at Tessie, a day later driving to Wisconsin, on what became one of the happiest days of my life, when I purchased her. And now, even she is gone.
I remember running into Karen Tuttle who is a quiet woman with black hair and glasses. She is creative and thoughtful, measuring her words as if they were flour for a recipe. But tough. She can tell the truth with kindness. The words were fierce, corrective, but said with such care, it didn’t matter. With three boys, two of whom were this side of adolescence she had to be. Karen pulled me alongside to watch her prepare her sons’ cattle for show and pulled me out of the way of a bull, who’d broken free and charged. I would have tried to stop him like you would a horse, but bulls aren’t horses. He would have plowed through me. That summer she invited Bruce and I for a picnic at White Pines state park and invited me to ride with her to the State Fair to help her keep track of her sons. When grief comes, people you don’t expect reach out.
This year, we ran into Karen’s son Brett, newly married, and fifty years old, proud of his farm, proud of her help, proud of his work. We were in the commercial building where I was headed towards a vendor who sold crystals. Those polished round stones feel good in my hands. I don’t know if they carry healing or energy like the young woman selling them said. Though they are made by the mighty forces melting and/or crushing them into the stones I held, so maybe so. Jesus said the stones would cry out if the children were hushed when they cried, “Hosanna. Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord” when Jesus entered the city five days before he would assume his throne and die.
Later we stopped by the chicken barn, where Brett’s parents are superintendents for the chicken show. This year there were eight hundred chickens entered. The chairs were comfortable as we settled in for another long conversation with Karen and Dan. Karen said she didn’t know how they would handle setting up for 800 chickens at the beginning of the week, but one family showed up asking how could they help? Then another and another. We talked about what it means to be old, to have grown children and to tend to a 97-year-old mother. She heard Jesus’ question before he died, “Can you not wait with me for an hour?” So she will wait with her mother and put her first. We swapped memories of a church we had in common years ago. I spoke of  the terror of having no one to watch over us when frail old age catches up to us. But she replied, “You never know who will show up.” True. True. I guess Bruce and I will have to trust the Lord and how He will provide. For once we exchanged phone numbers with the promise we would get in touch during the year, so we didn’t go so long without talking.
Bruce and I didn’t talk to many people, but we talked deeply with the ones we did. I came home feeling like my mind had been put back in my head. I think when you’re quiet too much, you forget how to speak. My speech therapist said it’s good for our brain health to talk to different people because you have to adjust your words to what they say. This fair it was a relief to find an equal exchange where I had to stay on my toes, responding to a back and forth, where we were both heard, not as one-sided venting on either side but good talk.
And then this week, Bruce and I returned home to a surprise on our porch. Our neighbor, Kiryn, had dropped off a bouquet of flowers, saying on a torn piece of paper bag, that said, “Just wanted to bring some extra sunshine to your day! Hope all is well!” I look at the flowers and see that Bruce and I aren’t as alone as I sometimes think we are.
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