alas, august.

mixed feelings about this month. too much is ripening all at once, not just in the garden.

sunday i shot a wedding reception and it was the most difficult photographic experience of my life. two big families, lots of big personalities, yelling, stress, frustration, exhaustion, bad badness. the photos turned out well which i guess is all that matters now, but i’ll think seriously hard before i accept another wedding job in the future.

this saturday is tour de fat, then that night i’m going to the fair. sunday i’m doing the red light variety photo shoot in idaho city which i can’t even wrap my brain around right now. today i spent hours working (not playing) in the garden, then even more hours editing photos...all while accomplishing the important goal of never getting out of my pjs.

this week is plenty busy at work, and every spare minute at home (until yesterday) was spent getting stuff ready for the state fair. i hadn’t been able to motivate myself to do any canning yet this year and bags of foraged fruit were taking up lots of space in my freezer, not to mention all the fruit that’s ripening right now and getting heaped into bowls making a mountain range of the kitchen counter, along with loads of squash and tomatoes and eggplants that i’m too exhausted to deal with. the fair entry deadline finally lit a fire under my ass.

i stayed up past 3am monday night making jellies. the kitchen was a disaster area like never before. it looked like a scene from hoarders.

tuesday was the day to bring everything in. it’s long-standing tradition for my mom and i to enter our stuff together--we drive out to the fairgrounds with her friend gail and the two of them sing along to the soundtrack of the old musical “state fair” like a pair of drunken hillbillies while i sit in the back seat giggling, making sure all the jars and bottles stay upright.

this year my mom was out of town. i had to haul everything by myself--eight bottles of her herb vinegars plus all my stuff: six jars of preserves, three collections of herb cuttings in jars of water, three 11x14 matted photos, knitted mittens and socks, 25 small tomatoes, eight ground cherries and five eggplants. do you know how hard it is to carry all these things, many of which are fragile, easily damaged and/or heavy, all at once by yourself? often it doesn’t occur to me that i can ask people for help, so i didn’t think to call anyone. i loaded most of the items into a rolling yarn tote (which ended up weighing at least 40lbs), photos and produce went in my backpack, then i carried the overflow in a mason jar box. making two trips would be unacceptable because i’m stubborn and i like to challenge myself, even when it’s enormously inconvenient.

a while ago jeanne and i were talking about the state fair, and about gardening, and how both of us could never have imagined ending up like this...so, country. if she could see me now, my 15-year-old self would judge my current self harshly--some of the shit i care about would seem unthinkably lame. when my family moved here from the east coast i resisted assimilation, resisted anything remotely similar to growing potatoes, anything uncivilized. i resisted for a long time. the process of giving way to whatever small-town, olden-times, pioneer-spirit current still flows here was slow at first, but now it’s swept me out, and i’m enjoying it.