After cancelling in 2020 and 2021, the Belchertown Fair was back this year. Little Springtime took ~ her new wife ~ to see this piece of Americana. They signed the "How far have you come" board in the exhibit hall, and I sincerely doubt there will be anyone who has come to the fair from further away:



The exhibit hall had some lovely homemade things, including this magnificent quilt:



There are some details ( under this cut )

The design isn't 100 percent original: there are patterns out there that are basically this (though this one has *more* than the ones I've looked at). At first that disappointed me, then I got to thinking, why am I bothered by that when I'm not bothered by people through the generations doing tumbling-blocks quilts or eight-pointed star quilts? And that lessened my disappointment somewhat. Not 100 percent, though: when I first saw this, I thought, Wow, what creativity and initiative! Whereas when I see a nice tumbling-blocks quilt, I don't think that. I think, Nice execution, nice cloth choices, nice color combinations, which is different. ANYWAY IT'S A NICE QUILT.

Besides the exhibit hall, I always like to visit the 4H tent. I used to always take the kids there because (a) cute animals and (b) cheap food and cheap, fun crafts.

cute animals




cheap and fun crafts


They were raffling off a giant Hershey bar. "I know someone wants this," the woman was saying. "Some kid wants to eat this whole thing and bounce off the walls for four days."

Not in the 4H tent, but I liked the different skin tones on the model kids in this face-painting guide, and I love that one thing you can have painted on you is a Peace Cheetah. (Third column from the left, second row--you'll have to click through and zoom in to see)



The woman looked like she was doing a careful job:



But of course what kids want to do most of all is....

Mrs. B., retired kindergarten teacher that two of my kids had, who also ran a 4-H group that one of my kids participated in. She and her husband also had a farm in town and sold produce at local farmers markets--he's passed away, and she doesn't do that now, but she was in the 4-H tent, next to the baby calves, holding an adolescent duckling, with silky black feathers, cradled in her hands, a smile on her face.

"How are the kids?" she asked, and I talked about the two who are in Japan, and she talked about her daughter who's been in Ireland for 12 years. And then four children came up, curious about the duck, and she started explaining how it was still a duckling and the smallest of its siblings, and she pointed out where the others were.

She's a wonderful woman. If only you could have seen her smile and the gentle way she held that duck.

Here are those baby calves.