I'm back!

So, I'm back from a fantastic trip to Canada where we reconnected with lots of friends and actually bumped into people in the street who we knew, which is a glorious experience, the glory of which you don't truly appreciate until you move to a strange country and are insanely gratified when the mailman smiles at you, even though you know he is only smiling at you because you are ferociously smiling at him and probably freaking him out.

Anyway.

While I missed the chicken truck, I compensated for it by eating my was through the Townships, Ottawa, Kingston, Seeley's Bay, Toronto, and Montreal... Feast highlights included insanely good Italian, greasy and scrumptious Indian, Vietnamese roll ups, Manx breakfasts and of course, Greek on Wheels, eaten parked on Kathryn's couch, watching an American "What Not To Wear" marathon. Fan-frickin-tastic.

I plan to blog it up like a madwoman next week, but have had to zoom to Paris (la la) to see Susie and now have a "thesis" that I'm supposed to be "working on" which should take up some of my "time." In the meanwhile, I'm cheating and posting something I've written that was actually published recently (!) and for which I was actually paid (!!).

Here it is, my ode to the Fair:

As a rural teenager, the annual harvest fair was the highlight of my social calendar. It was the Academy Awards of my adolescence, except, instead of wearing Valentino on the red carpet, it was tube tops in the cow barn.

The fair was a time to reconnect with friends I hadn’t seen over the whole summer. While three months may not seem that long to an adult, time is like dog years for teens, and a lot can happen in ninety days. Kids who’d been baby-faced, metal mouthed shrimps in June, had lost the braces, learned to French kiss and grown four-inches by August. In the face of these dizzying changes it became vitally important to seem cool. This wasn’t easy and finding an outfit that looked good in the murky gloom of the sheep pens or the floodlit intensity of the grandstand required more planning than a shuttle launch, and was just as prone to epic disaster.

The best part of the fair was hanging out with my friends. We rode the roller coaster, our thrilled screams reflecting every tortuous climb into the air, and each juddering plunge towards the earth. Testing our skills on the midway games, we lost more quarters throwing darts at balloons then we gained in garish stuffed animals. The appetites we worked up trying to win that pink unicorn could only be satisfied by fair food: corn on the cob dripping in butter, greasy French fries and sickly sweet doughnuts, still warm from the oven.

Of course, the fair, like everything else, got more complicated as a teenager. The “dagger and rose” design at the dingy tattoo booth caught my eye, and while the greasy-haired man wielding the sinister-looking needle didn’t deter me, the need for parental permission did. I had my first sip of beer behind the barns and the illicitness of that act seemed mitigated by the smell of fresh hay and the gentle sounds of the animals’ breathing. The fair was also the place where I experience my first kiss. While the setting, beneath the romantic neon glow of the “Smoked Meat and Sour Kraut” sign at the canteen, left something to be desired, the rest of the experience did not.

I still love the fair, not for the candy apples, the midway rides, or even the horse pull but because it arrives at the end of every humid summer, bringing a hint of cool air, the return to routine and a bittersweet sense of time passing. I no longer agonize over what to wear to the fair, but the corn on the cob is still the sweetest of the season and meeting up with old friends is still the best part.

note: In the interest of creating a nostalgic-y tone for this piece, I kind of, well, lied. For instance, I have never worn a tube top in my life, never wanted a tattoo, and didn't have my first sip of beer or kiss at the fair What we have learned from this is that I have no journalistic integrity. Probably best to stick to the blogsphere...

If my admitted truth-stretching doesn't repel you, and you want to check out where this sucker appears, here's the link: www.harrowsmithcountrylife.ca/almanac.php and it's in stores now!