To County Fairs

Bring your Amber White and Gold Star chickens, your Berkshire, Hampshire, Yorkshire and Blue Butt pigs, your Arabian and Quarter horses. Bring your Flemish Giant and Angora rabbits and your Red Ear Slider turtles. Bring all the guinea pigs you can carry and all the sheep that will fit in the barn. Dairy cows with their big baby eyes.

Children wearing cowboy boots as much for work as for fashion tend to the animals as much livestock as pets. They brush the animals until their coats and feathers shine, humming to the radio they have plugged into the corner of the stall. One girl has decorated her horses stall with white stars and red and blue crepe paper ribbons. She has a collage of pictures hanging on the front of the stall, photo after photo of her face next to the horse, sometimes one smiling, sometimes the other. One is named Daisy and the other is Macy, but it’s not clear which is which.

Home Arts is in the next barn: cakes decorated like bouquets of roses, Little House on the Prairie, an Model T Ford. Quilted scenes of sunrises and sunsets, knitted sweaters for babies and dogs and the people who love them. Pickled beets, eggs, asparagus, carrots, cucumbers with jalapenos. I leave dizzy with the optimism/realism worldview combo that every booth delivers.

But the best are the rides, few of which I can ride given the warning signs that list all the conditions that make the ride a bad idea (back conditions, heart condition, lack of muscle control, dizziness, motion sickness, seizures), which is simultaneously the list of conditions you will leave the ride with. Whit is old enough to ride the Scrambler, and I volunteer to ride along because I can do circles, but Keith does heights, so we trade off. The ride goes around in a big circle, while the individual cars spin on their own axis while also going in towards the middle and out towards the edge.

When it starts, we are holding on to the bar tightly. Whit pulls and pushes himself against the force throwing us around, and as the ride speeds up, we whoop and hollar. But after a few minutes, the motion is frightening, and after a few more, it isn’t exciting, and after more, it isn’t fun. We spin in and out of view of the funnel cakes booth and the merry-go-round. We see Keith and then he’s gone. We speed past the crowd in line for the next turn, the carnie standing by the power bar. He’s not smiling when he tells the kids to move back. When I see him again, he is looking over all their heads at something in the distance. He starts to wave, but then stops and shakes his head. “Time’s up!” he shouts.