Feature Writer Karen Crowder – Kicking Off the Fall with a Bazaar
Every year in early September, our parish has a bazaar, and it has become a tradition for Marion, Mary, and me to spend time there. I was up late on Friday night baking peanut butter, chocolate chip, and oatmeal cookies as my contribution. At 10:45 the following morning, Mary and Marian rang my buzzer, bringing lunch and desert to have that afternoon.
Mary is my homemaker and began cleaning while we continued to prepare everything. Marion and I made a project organizing and discarding old Braille magazines. At 12:15, as we left my apartment, we were surprised by a warm and gentle summer mist. We dashed to the car and drove the short distance to Our Lady of our Lake church.
After parking, we walked across a short street into the parish center–the delicious smell of baked goods tantalized us the whole way. We walked to the booth and gave the cookies and Marion’s apple cakes to the smiling, pleasant woman who was going to sell them. As Marion and I started walking towards the white elephant table, Mary rushed over, saying, “They want to thank you for your contribution.” The nice woman thanked me, but made sure to ask if any of the cookies had nuts in them. I said no, explaining there is real butter in the oatmeal and peanut butter cookies, but I reduced the amount of sugar in all of them.
As we went to browse for bargains, you could hear the quiet conversations among people sitting at tables enjoying pie and ice cream. While Mary looked at dishes and Christmas items, Marion and I browsed through some videos, DVDs, CDs, and cassette tapes. There were so many to search through, though cassettes and videos were far outnumbered by their digital counterparts. I chose four tapes by popular artists and a beautifully packaged double video of the classic movie “Gone with the Wind.” After buying some other items, we took a break to have some pie and ice cream.
Though the feeling of autumn was in the air, we were forced to run for the car as a gentle summer shower started to fall. It was a very small storm initially, as I could still feel the rays of sun on my face in between the drops of rain. As we crossed the street, Mary looked up and saw a rainbow. As we waited on the rain, we reminisced about how the 2008 bazaar had been rained out because of tropical storm Hannah. We all had to run in torrential downpours toward the car and the rest of that bazaar was rained out.
The rain unfortunately kept up, but we were still able to duck inside quickly for the evening Mass. While it wasn’t a total rain-out, it was unfortunate that the weather wasn’t a little nicer.
With summer almost over, harvest festivals and fairs will be popping up all over the place. Do you have any local events that you’ll attend or work at? Let us hear about them in the Reader’s Forum.