I love fall fair season.
It’s impossible to be cranky, unless you are the Carpenter, because I am the most excited person at the fair (which means I’m dragging him to every exhibit, food booth and challenging him to every game on the midway until we win a stuffed toy).
Mind you we come at fairs from very different backgrounds.
I have a sentimental attachment to fairs, despite having no actual agricultural ties in my family. We were not farmers. We were city folk who left the jungle for the suburbs.
But my love of farms, car rides and back roads is inherited from my father, the only person I ever met who would drive an hour for ice cream just so we could tour through the countryside and appreciate the rural landscape, look at the animals and big barns, and smell that country air. Happy memories.
The Carpenter, however, was raised in the heart of Huron County, where kids got time off school to plant and harvest, and chores weren’t posted on a fridge with gold stars for washing dishes. Labour was in fact, labour. Hours were long, street lights were for townies and tractors shared the road with respect. His work ethic is rooted in his upbringing.
This year, the Fergus Fall Fair is themed “Family Ties and Family Pies,” and this takes me back to the woman I credit with all of the Carpenter’s goodness, his mother Ruth. She was an angel among humans, the mother of seven rascals, with a heart so big it couldn’t live past the tender age of 64.
But before her sudden passing, before the Carpenter and I were married or our children could see her beautiful smile, I had the fortune of getting to know Ruth. We were fast friends. I admired her strength for raising a family with limited means, and her humble nature. She was happy and humble. Enough was good enough for her. There are several things I will never forget about Ruth: her hugs that enveloped you in an embrace that was warm and genuine, the way she smiled at the Carpenter with a love I could not appreciate until I too had a son, and the way her eyes would sparkle when she laughed, which was often.
But Ruth’s signature gift was her apple pie. That woman could make a pie crust like no one else. I can still imagine the taste of those thick, juicy apples, smothered in cinnamon and sweetness, layered deep in a blanket of flaky crust. Mysteriously, it didn’t crumble to bits when we cut into it. Cliché as it sounds, when food is made with love, you can taste it. Ruth baked her pies to share with people who would feel nurtured with every bite, but it didn’t stop us from fighting with sharp instruments to get the last piece of pie (well, it’s family, right?).
Ruth’s apple pie embodied everything about home, family and togetherness. It was worth the drive to Huron County, past the hog farms, dairy barns and horse pastures, where you could tell the history of the town by the names on the mailboxes as you drove past. Connection. Tradition. History. Community.
No matter how you slice it, our fall fairs are a tradition worth celebrating. Even the Carpenter agrees.
See you at the fair.