Yes, dear friends, it's fall, and for me that means that my small town will soon be overrun with Buicks and Cadillacs driven at 20 mph by elderly men with their wives next to them screaming, "Edgar, slow down! There's a curve up ahead!" But it also means that the leaves will be bright and pretty, that I'm one season closer to graduation, and that I can finally wear that great long jacket I just bought at the thrift store. Plus, it's festival time!
Us Southerners, we love to celebrate. And we like to do it best in the fall with lots of craft vendors, live music, and fried foods, some on a stick. We'll celebrate anything, we don't care. We celebrate wooly worms, the Andy Griffith show, and Hillbilly Heritage (none of these made up, I swear). Yesterday, I celebrated apples.
I love festivals. I didn't go to a lot of them as a kid, (except for an isolated one celebrating amateur radio) because Mama worked Saturdays and Daddy just isn't a festival kind of guy. But I used to go with Casey to the one held in the nearby town of Morganton, which as far as I can tell, was celebrating the nearby town of Morganton. I always had a great time, and since Wilkesboro is another nearby town, I thought I'd head down there for a little apple party.
I rode the shuttle from the medical park to downtown, as parking at the festival was as much as $10. I stepped off the Wilkes Transit Authority van, a guide for getting back to my car in my hand. Apparently, the driver thought I did not look like a local. And then I started in.
Jewelry, pottery, marshmallow shooters made of PVC pipe, everything a little overpriced and some of it pretty weird. The label of "handcrafted" on everything only meant that you could probably make it yourself if you had the materials. But every once in a while, you came across something different. The jewelry made with real pressed flowers. The garden statues made of welded tools that looked like chickens. The ceramic urns that looked like heads. The coin banks made from old post office boxes. Those were the kinds of things that tempted me. There were a million booths with windchimes, but I liked the ones made from old silverware. I walked by several pottery booths with little more than a glance, but stayed and watched at the one where the potter helped little kids make bowls. I also particularly liked the booth with the coaster that had a menorah on it and said "Shalom, Y'all." I ended up with a pressed flower necklace, some earrings shaped like crutches (just for weirdness), and a gift for my dad.
Of course everything had a theme. This was clearly a Southern Festival, and a North Carolina one at that. You could buy your hand-painted hummingbird feeder made from an Orange Crush bottle, and you could get it with flowers, or you could get it with the Wolfpack on it. Most places had a section of items with college teams, always featuring Duke, NC State, and Carolina, with the occasional Appalachian (go Mountaineers!) thrown in. Me, I liked the purses made of team license plates, and I helped the guy selling them move the NC State ones in front of the Carolina ones.
A lot of booths were there to raise money for some cause or another. A lot of churches sold food and gave out tapes of their best singers. There was a booth for the Humane Society with lots of dogs, and even a booth raising money for students wishing to be dental assistants to take some exam. My favorite was the crippled children booth, which sold these thick neon meter sticks with bold lettering about the cause on them. The first time I saw one of these sticks, I thought it said, "I bought this to help cripple children!" What a difference the letter 'D' makes.
One of the festival's big advertising points is the live music, but I don't know anyone who comes there for that, except maybe the musicians' friends and families. There were a couple of vocal quartets singing gospel music (one was working on "I'll Fly Away" when I walked by), and a few banjo/guitar/fiddle trios singing old country songs. It was all very rural south, so of course I liked it very much and sang along when I knew the songs, which was always.
And then there was the food. Festival food is all the same, though there was a lot of apple-oriented food. But even the apple food fit into the festival food category by being prepared in one simple way: fried. Maybe in other areas of the country, festival food is different, but here in the South, the deeper and the fatter the frier, the better. Funnel cakes, onion rings, fried peanuts, fried apple pies, everything was a delicious heart attack wrapped in a greasy paper towel. Of course, there were a lot of apple vendors, too. At the end of every block was a giant tent, where they sold apples, apple cider, apple juice, apple butter, and apple jelly. I didn't buy any of these things, mostly because there were so many yellow jackets around these tents that I didn't even stop and look at them for long without being bothered.
I stayed for maybe three hours at the Brushy Mountain Apple Festival (sponsored by the Brushy Mountain Ruritans), and I had what's known as a good ole time. Maybe these kinds of festivals are the same everywhere, even if the kinds of things being celebrated are different. But I don't think you can get Duke bird feeders just anywhere, and it's the things like that that make me love the South.
Shalom, y'all.
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