It is a holy week…..actually twelve days……here in Minnesota. It is the week of the Great-Minnesota -Get- Together, otherwise known as the State Fair. Now I recognize that not all people see it as a holy week…some find it annoying, tacky, silly…and still others don’t even notice that it’s going on. But, for me and my family, we would be there every day if we could. In fact my husband and I love the Fair so much that we have dreamed of taking vacation and working at the Fair….all twelve days!
Now before you get a misguided view of my love for the Fair, let me explain. It is not the thrills and chills of the Midway that attracts me or even so much the food on a stick. I am, instead, drawn by the cows and horses, the goats and sheep, the pigs and even the amazingly huge boar. And that is not to say anything of all those fresh faced teenagers who care for these fantastic animals. Curled up on sleeping bags next to their wards, applying makeup while sitting on a hay bale, playing cards as a thousand pound beast sits at your feet, how can a person not fall in love with that?
In the horticulture building, I could spend hours poring over the giant, orange pumpkins, the perfect, purple eggplants, the shiny red, ripe tomatoes. The honey room…how is it possible to have so many different colors?….pulls me in with its sweetness. And the row after row of luscious jams and jellies, perfect pickles swimming in vinegar, green beans, miniature pickled corn, all back lit to create a palette of brilliant color that dazzles the eye.
The relationship of human to seed, of human to egg, of creature to Creator, is the message of the Fair for me. Those who offer their animals, vegetables,and fruits to the Fair, do so with at least a tacit understanding that they are a part of the vast miracle that is Creation. Most notably, they do this on our behalf…we city dwellers who may have forgotten where our food comes from,how soil and seed come together to keep us alive, how animals sacrifice their very lives for our sustenance. During the Fair, if we allow ourselves, we are reminded of the great cycles of life of which we all are a part. You can’t put that on a stick!
Barbara Kingsolver in her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle:A Year of Food Life understands this kind of amazing connection." From the outlaw harvests of my childhood, I’ve measured my years by asparagus. I sweated to dig it into countless yards I was destined to leave behind, for no better reason than that I believe in vegetables in general, and this one in particular. Gardeners are widely known and mocked for this sort of fanaticism. But other people fast or walk long pilgrimages to honor the spirit of what they believe makes our world whole and lovely. If we gardeners can, in the same spirit, put our heels to the shovel, kneel before a trench holding tender roots, and then wait three years for an edible incarnation of the spring equinox, who’s to make the call between ridiculous and reverent?"
State Fair…ridiculous or reverent….you decide.