If temperatures are any indication, last weekend was the end of summer this year. I doubt that we’re actually done with warm temperatures, but right now it is flannel shirt and jeans weather.
I wore shorts all weekend in the Twin Cities where the State Fair sported the best weather I’ve ever experienced there. Northfield was cool as well when we returned Juliet for her junior year.
Deep-fried ranch dressing was worth the entry price along with the plethora of craft beer samplings. The spicy deep-fried pickle chips were pretty darn good and with a few tweaks the jalapeno popper cream cheese donut with bacon and hot honey would have been fantastic. The bucket of fries is always better than the bucket of cookies in my humble savory opinion. The corn is summer. The Fifth Avenue Stage rocked live music acts in short sets on Saturday night, but the best part outside of the lights and live baby animals and live big animals and live performances on the Family Stage and live sampling of something different and tasty every few minutes was the ART.
The Creative Activities Art building and the Fine Arts building are two of my favorites and they never disappoint. Minnesota has some talented artists and artisans. I could’ve walked around there another couple of hours even though I clocked almost nine miles that afternoon and night.
On the highways and byways driving down and back I had time to reflect on some of my own art and the roads my words might be travelling down themselves. It was hard. Truth be told, no matter how many times I have already left one of my kids at college… 21 semesters and 10 j-terms (who’s counting) it never gets easier.
So that was on my mind. I enjoy Juliet’s tradition of spending the weekend with all of us together and then hitting the State Fair. It is a very fun end to summer and it relieves some of the stress and anxiety of returning her to school.
After having her home all summer it feels like a huge hole is left when she’s back in college.
That’s what happens inside me after each of our kids come to visit, are home for a while and then return. I feel like part of me, of us, is missing. I am proud of them all and feel grateful for their successes and independence, but we’ve always been close and it isn’t easy just to change how things have been.
Her and I and Lucy had a good run this season at the Ely Farmers Market and the two of us got to write some good poems for people. That’s something that we’ll always be connected with, our love of words. As she gets ready to enter a semester full of advanced writing classes, I look forward to the poetry, plotlines and characters that she’ll create.
It will be like walking through the art buildings at the State Fair again. Inspirational. Inspirational -- but part of me. Connected in a way that those beautiful, award winning creations can never be.
This is what I feel when I hold a piece of pottery created by Lucy, when I drink my morning coffee out of a mug her hands crafted, her mind conceived and her glazes colored. I’m fired up (*pun). It is the way I feel when I wear a t-shirt over and over again that has art on it that Simon has drawn or printed from a woodcut or linocut he carved and inked. I think of him, bent over, shaving away the negative space, creating something from what was before totally blank and would’ve remained that way if he didn’t pick up the blade or pen. If Juliet didn’t take her fingers off of home row, the books she finished in high school and the scripts she’s working on now, the countless poems written on the spot for people in the park would just be words floating in the ether.
We are connected. That is the thought that propelled me home while Jen and Lucy, tired in the car after a long weekend and Sammy’s sausage pizza, took naps. Behind the wheel I got woven back into the warp and the weft of the tapestry of our lives and I began to think about what comes next.
