Squash, Tents, Pears, and Community

You all know I’m big on community. I’m always blah-blah-blahing about the importance of community, the passing down and around of skills and knowledge, the sharing nature of humans, the way we WANT to be together, even if we think we don’t. We can learn so much from each other, and there is great value in showing up for others as well as (something I need to work on—) letting other people show up for us. This includes the tangible AND the emotional, which are pretty closely knit, when you think about it.

This past weekend, my family participated in the annual event called The Feast of the Hunters Moon, which is an historic reenactment event specifically celebrating the communities that lived here in our area of West Lafayette along the Wabash River from the years 1717-1791. (Pretty sure those are the years…) I love this event, and I love that time period of my hometown’s history, when Wea tribes and French settlers lived in harmonious community for an extended time. Everything about it makes me so happy—the honoring of that time, the reenactors who come together, the days spent outside living primitively, most of us without cell signal. There are food booths, demonstration booths, shopping booths. There are bagpipers, marching militia, voyageur canoes. Dancing, caber throwing, music! There’s even an outdoor 18th century tavern!

My family’s role in the event is to make soap. We make soap with lard and lye. It’s actually a pretty boring booth, I’d say one of the most boring because you can’t really touch anything since we're dealing with harmful lye, and unless chemistry interests you, our soap making is neither special nor interesting. Our soap doesn’t smell like anything because we don’t put anything in it to make it smell good. It doesn’t look pretty because it’s made by amateurs. It appears to be something good to eat, but no. However, while we don’t appeal to eyeballs or appetites, we are VERY friendly, and since we don’t really DO much (soap making is not especially difficult… it’s really just hours of stirring) we have lots of time to visit with the community members who accidentally come upon our booth, usually thinking we are selling some kind of food, and then disappointed that we don’t, but feel awkward leaving immediately without listening to our boring little speech.

Lucky for me, talking to people is one of my favorite things to do! And one of the great parts of the Feast is that a lot of other people there also love to talk! As a result, I often meet a lot of fascinating people, and this year was one of the best. I met SO! MANY! AMAZING! HUMANS! There was the couple up at the fort’s Blockhouse, (which is newer construction building made to look as it would have if it were home to a fur trapper,) who were so friendly and it turned out the man is a musician and knows some of the same people I know. There was the girl I met who looked so familiar, but what actually got us talking was that she COMPLIMENTED MY BEAUTIFUL CAR:

I mean, who wouldn’t?!?

—and I told her it’s great for hauling kids around, and she told me some of her past jobs which was why I recognized her, and then she gave me some squash!!!! She just gave me—a stranger who drives a beautiful car—three acorn squash, and told me the best way to eat it! (Fire roasted with sugar and butter.)

AnD tHeN!!!!! A friend threw a surprise birthday party for another friend, which included singing sea shanties around the campfire and eating DELECTABLE cake made by her sister, and the whole thing was a beautiful, happy celebration. On the walk back to the car, I heard a distant hello, which I ignored, until this vaguely familiar (it was really dark) human bounded up to say hello. It was the daughter of some friends, all grown up, a beautiful human doing amazing things! And she said her friend was over there too, a friend who, once upon a time, was Greta’s violin teacher, but now is also a lovely young lady doing amazing things! So I stepped over to say hello (with 3/4 of my daughters and a number of musical instruments) and it turned out they were doing a very poor job of setting up their tent, and they had become a bit stuck, and they just didn’t have enough arms,—that was the whole problem as far as I could see—so my girls and I helped them set up their darling little canvas triangle tent in a lovely grove of pines, in the very thick darkness.

I’m pleased to say, the next day was more of the same. Two of my girls had ballet rehearsal in the middle of the day, which meant I was back and forth between town and the event, and in the duration of my shuttling, I met the most wonderful people! I paid to park in a lady’s yard and she told me all about the neighborhood and how much they love it and what a wonderful childhood it provided their now grown children. She was so friendly and so sweet! During ballet I wandered through the farmers market where I witnessed community bartering alongside the most encouraging words, then was gifted a bag of pears and grapes by a farmer friend.

Back at the event grounds the beauty just kept going. So many connections made simply by standing behind a table stirring an iron pot of lard and lye for 8 hours, directing people to the vinegar vessel when they accidentally touched the fresh soap. It was nothing remarkable and yet so astounding at the same time, the way people share their stories with just the gentlest of nudges to do so. From my vantage point, the whole weekend was a swirl of people connecting with each other, and it was just beautiful. Old classmates of ours, old students of our mothers’, grown up children of friends and acquaintances. Faces everywhere, old and new.

Community. Now more than ever it is ridiculously important. It’s vital that we show our children that community can be found and connections can be made in so many places—yes, through the virtual world of screens where the wider ocean of readers and viewers makes it easy to find like-minded fish, but also right in front of you, close enough to reach out and touch, there are humans with stories that are worth hearing. And I hope I have emphasized that, while I AM a conversation initiator, being the initiator is not necessary to see and value the community that is surrounding you. Go out and look, go out and listen. Go out and notice the people around you—the girl working the bakery stall at your farmers market, or the young people putting on a car wash fundraiser in a parking lot. You may feel like you are too shy to have a role on this type of hand-to-hand social stage, but that’s okay! Wait for someone else to start the conversation. Listening is just as important as talking. But also, tell people when you appreciate them—if someone has made an impact on you, tell them! In the storytelling booth (Sylvi’s favorite) a lovely young lady came in, probably in her early 20s, and she sat and listened to a story, then told the storyteller how she had always been her favorite, what a talent she had for storytelling, etc., etc., and it was magical! This young lady (who was GORGEOUS, by the way, I never in my life would have picked her out as a storytelling-in-a-canvas-tent-sitting-on-straw-bales-Top-Fan) felt moved to share with this older woman what she has meant to her. Complete strangers! Up to that point, they had not spoken a word to each other. Amazing.

The reminders I got this weekend, the connections I was lucky enough to witness, were something truly special.

The world is so wide, and we are are each and all a part of it. What a gift!