(Has it truly been ten years since I was here last..)
It’s getting on time for a pilgrimage. My wild pagan heart knows it. Time to be packing the car with tent and pop-ups and cooler, all the crazy clothes I can’t wear in day-to-day life, my accordion. Loads of scarves, tapestries, bells and incense. Crystals. Time to worry if that noise I’ve ignored all winter is going to give way somewhere on the Pennsylvania turnpike (it never has, but maybe this is the year). To leave the early spring chill of northeast Ohio behind and head south and east. Watching trees come into flower and leaf as I go.
Finally to arrive at the magic farmstead I may or may not ever see again, at the event that no longer happens there. To drive down that anonymous curving road, turning in the delta of a drive, past the market gardens and over the bridge, the creek cold and burbling as I cross. Up past the horse barn, past the porta potty grotto, past earlier arrivals already putting up their booths, ribbons of every spring color fluttering in the trees. Turning left when the drive dead-ends at the chicken barn, up that steep steep hill to the camping troll. Checking in, hugging any nearby familiar faces. Finding some open ground to set up camp before it’s dark. Home. Home. Home. Tears in my eyes knowing I can only return now in my head.
The pilgrimage of recent years has changed. Now it’s more south, less east, not so long a drive. No longer to a camping hill but a classic roadside motel, pine paneling and thrifted furnishings. Putting up my booth in a city park, dragging it all from the car to my spot via a battered old Radio Flyer wagon that still serves the job it was gifted for. No that’s ok, I can manage (I can no longer truly manage but I don’t like to admit it). Booth up, how to set the tables, cloths down, what am I displaying where this year. Greet more friends, the ones I have known for decades now but see only once a year. Take note of where others are, still busy with their own setups; to be caught up with later. Hang the tarp walls all around, shut tight for the night, and back to my room. Chinese takeaway for dinner, or maybe just something I can fix in the microwave.
Then two days of the best times in my life - children oohing over the ribbon wands and flower crowns, teens moping through to look at art they have no money to buy. Endless try-ons of floral wreaths, horn tying examples, now and then someone who buys a leaf-bedecked tshirt or hand-batiked capris. Everywhere music, laughter, bubbles. Midday the Order of the Greenman may march through, green clothing trimmed out with carefully pruned branches, dispensing fat acorn blessings. Horns and haloes, thorns and petals. Two sets a day from Frenchy and the Punk; I don’t often leave my booth but I’ll stand at the edge and dance. A bag of stitchery at my feet, cheese and triscuits for lunch, sketching notes and ideas For Next Year.
Too soon it’s all over and I’m packing it all away again, more wagon trips back to the car, so many wagon trips. Spend time I ‘should’ use for teardown standing around talking; a handful of us with punk roots reminiscing over bands, clubs, shows we’ve seen or wished we had, even as we now manifest in steampunkery, derbies and stripes, flounces and combat boots. Where you headed next. Some are on to the next event; I never quite levelled up to that tho it once was the aim. Might have done, but for all the things that stood in my way. No, my next event is weeks or months away and back in town; there may be another trip midsummer but not like this. Nothing like this.
I’m writing this out because this year I won’t have even that. Yes, it’s for Good Reason; I’ll be spending that weekend loading a truck, leaving behind the life and part of town I’ve known for - whoa. Nearly as long as I made that journey into Faerie. The two times did overlap some; the best of the festival years were ones where I departed from where I am now, not where I used to be. The far side of town. Moving to one even farther; an area I’ve spent time around but never lived in. It’s something I’ve wanted and worked for for literal years and I know down the line it will be Good For Me, but.
But it’s keeping me grounded when the side that wants to get away, to travel, to go be nomadic for a time is crying to Go. To wander through small towns where no one knows me, dine at some little diner I’ll likely never step foot in again (or maybe I will, maybe it will be worth remembering and stopping at next year). I want to follow half-understood directions I printed out a week ago and listen to audiobooks while I drive - I forget most of what I read each month but I can tell you many of the ones I’ve played while traveling. My soul *needs* me to do this. I’m promising it Later This Summer, but it will be so so hard to let spring come into bloom and not be driving past all those never-taken exits and through the tunnels that require you to put your lights on. Will it even still be spring? Of course the seasons will turn whether I go or not, and age imposes new rhythms on me. I do not feel ready to give up things I have loved so well, but it is the orthodox Lenten season and this is the sacrifice the universe requires me to make. Who knows, perhaps by Solstice we can celebrate right in our own backyard.
But next year, I swear I’ll be on the road again.
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