Getting back to Life as Usual

Post-Fair exhaustion was long-lasting this year, as everything I took out there came back damp and I spent the rest of the week hauling everything out into the sun to get dried out. Happily it was sunny and I got it all (okay, mostly) done. I managed to organize enough for Market and had a record day, again. My sales are up so much this year I keep thinking the bubble will break, but for whatever reason I am having a lot of success. Some might say after 41 years of Market I have figured it out, but a lot is just luck. Apparently my hats have become a Fair "thing" in that people come to get one every year and kids have it on their list too, and lots of young people at Market have found something they want to buy, supplementing the tourists who are always delighted to find useful bags and gifts for men and dog-sitters and items low-priced and easy to pack. That makes me so grateful I cannot even express it. I raised the price of the hand-colored hats and people didn't even blink. I think the items I offer are so clearly not the mall-wear that is available, the craft community is really reaping the rewards of the homogenization of commodities. People want real things. We have them.

Today is my first rest day and there are still lots of things on my list. I'm not really resting. I have one set of minutes to type which is why I am here procrastinating and ordering my thoughts. I am about to actually take a vacation to a family reunion back east and that will be a good test of my resting capabilities. Generally I am not good at it, but I plan to leave my laptop at home and not even look online. Should be great!

I felt that the theme of Fair was that everything good had a barb to it, every rose a thorn, if you will. My sales were over-the-top good, but I am liquidating my clothing lines so selling it all off at cost, more or less. Some things were sold for less than I paid for them, but keeping them for several years already devalues them so all I can do about it is learn to spend and work smarter for the future. I don't transition very well; I tend to overproduce when things are good and then end up carrying that excess for way too long. I finally took the kids shirts this year after two years and most of my kids shirts' customers didn't find them. The bargain baskets are hidden and not really accessible, and much of what is in there isn't desirable unless you are a 2X or just need a clean shirt no matter how it fits or looks.  But women's longsleeves are gone now and the other types of clothing greatly reduced in volume. I am thinking of not taking any of it to Holiday Market at all, which would be quite a change. Nothing but hats and bags, which will of course fill the space and might allow a bit more room for people.

I don't like being the seller of cheap shirts so it will be a relief when all of it is finally gone but it will take another Fair at least. I reprinted the unofficial logo shirts like the Geezer and they sold astonishingly well on the one day I had them out, so rather than reprinting them for the last time, I will probably do it again. I hold on too long to everything, and am constantly nostalgic for shirts from the past, having a hard time letting go of even the Fish Tie shirts first sold in 1984. Clearly I am finished printing that stuff. I am finished printing a lot of things. Next big step will be to reclaim the screens so there is no way to print them again.

My body clearly told me I can not continue to overwork that hard every year. The barb in the good sales was the pains and suffering. I don't want a life that insists on painkillers and leads to surgeries. I want to use this great sales year to finance somehow a less-successful sales year in the future when I can dial in only what really works and jettison some of what only kind-of works. I have to stay so focused for the several months before the Fair that everything else has to yield, including relationships and social activities, and I know nobody knows how that really works for me. I really have zero time for anything but work from about March to now, every year. Every day. My few hours in the evenings that I would watch TV or read were mostly enforced by the fact that my body refused to allow anything productive, either my foot too tender to walk or my arm numb and protesting. My denial of these pains is a sometimes startling lack of concern for my future and my present. I know I'm not the only one who deals like this, but I'm the only one in my life who is going to pay for it, in some unknown way that I really must start to calculate. Working on that.

So the biggest barb was that I neglected one of the relationships that facilitated my work the most, and I'm guessing it's ruined now. It had been troublesome for awhile but I guess neither of us was willing to break it until forced. We can try taking out the OCF piece and see what is left, if we can find a way to talk to each other again. It will eventually settle out I suppose, but I feel like the thing I need to learn is not to push these things to destruction but to address them before they explode. The avoidance process ends this way often enough. The overworking leads to the avoidance. I see my responsibility in it, and the ways I am programmed to follow that course, but that doesn't help much. Changing behavior patterns is so hard! I'm going to need all that community support that is so available in my Fair Family.

Fair Family is so real and full, but it doesn't come easy and it has to be flexible. Just wanting everything to stay the same doesn't work, and we reflected a lot on all of the years we had our little kids running around in their wings and fantasies, how we raised our families and ourselves in that loving and safe atmosphere. There really is no anger out there, or rather, all emotions are worked out in the woods. The evolution of our thinking as a collective group has most certainly created an alternative that we recognize. We bring our best selves out there, open and trusting, trying our best to love and hope. It fails when our damage and our pains get in the way and make us selfish, forgetting the proportions and perspectives we must keep in mind. No one is in less pain than I am, permanently, meaning, all lives carry unimaginable pain, distress, and worry, and we're all fairly equal in that. You don't know mine and I don't know yours and we just have to remember to be kind and caring and allow that while we might be one in a million, there are a million just like us. We have to continue to work to find joy and we can't give up. We have to say the hard things and then lighten our hearts. We have to stop complaining so much too.

The rain was a challenge that just proved we can handle it. I did a good job with tarps with lots of help and also relearned a few things about tarps and lots of help. We might have been a little hard on the neighbors but were also very helpful and it seemed like we got along great with the new people on one side and the village and everyone around. It seemed to go very well in the most rainy year ever, so now we know that not everything has to be a disaster. Happy people came. Mud was minimized. We got to leave on Monday.

Meanwhile things I care very much about, the Market, the Farmers, the City and how it works, have been ignored but other people paid attention while I was too busy. It's better for me to take a little distance from it and let the process flow sometimes, let other people's opinions rise to the top without my influence, which can be limiting sometimes. I want to try to step back from some of my volunteering, just some small steps for now, but mostly to relax and have more time to be creative and to pursue some of my other goals. I guess I'm happy to have too much to do, on some levels. Some of it is overwhelming and it's better if I don't look too closely at it. Most of it just has its time of importance and then has to wait on the shelf for that time to cycle around again. I took two tubs of Jell-O out there and didn't wear a single piece (granted, misty rain is not the best for those things) and I didn't even wear any earrings or frou-frou. I barely changed clothes to be honest, except the inner layers. All I did was work, with one notable sauna. (Pro tip: the best time to seriously sauna is between noon and three.)

I had the goal to see every craft booth so I sped around the various loops and tried to view it all, discovering much of interest but spending no time really exploring it. I bought three little things. I saw no shows unless they came to me, which a couple did! Thanks to the Radar Angels and Steel Wool and thanks to the never-ending promenade of people around and around the loops. I think that is what I miss the most, the lively mix of people passing by my front door on their way to dinner or a shower or whatever they were going to. I love the feel of that evening stroll that is what people do in small towns all over the world: you go out with your loved ones and walk around seeing everyone in town. That is where the relationships are begun, when you see each other acting naturally, being real, sharing life, in your context. That is really wonderful and why I like to camp out there. Sleeping isn't easy, but meals are everywhere, and having a cozy home to retreat to with a place to make a cup of coffee and sit and talk with family is the gold of the Fair for me. I guess that is the next challenge, to contemplate how to protect and sustain that and not lose it.

I'm a worker, and though I talk about wanting to retire, it really just means changing my work to fit my aging. I'm not going to be one to sit around. I'm an Elder, but I don't want to give up what I do for Fair. It's a common dilemma for crafters. It's going to be a big topic in our Craft Committee discussions this year. How to tighten up and loosen up at the same time is the challenge for Fair. We have to fill our individual needs in the context of our collective ones. It takes a lot of thought and a lot of working together with all kinds of people, with the goal of bringing all of us along. I am very hopeful, in fact, convinced, that we can do it. So many of us have made this part of our lives, one of the strongest parts. We're in it, and going to stay in it.

So even with all the shit that comes with that, it's what we're made of. Maybe part of my role is to get to work on that 50th anniversary interpretation of the peach. It won't be long. I'm going to want to be there, and I might as well admit I'm going to work my right livelihood magic on it at the same time. Because Fair, and Market, are me and I am them. There's no separating that now, and there probably never was.