My transportation to the Puyallup Fair yesterday was Pierce Transit. When my sister and I went to the fair with our mother in the car, we passed by the large brick building recently restored, the Albers Mill Building.

In the background of the photo is the Tacoma Dome, in the foreground is the hotshop of the Glass Museum. The bus in the photo is not the express bus to the fair. The express bus takes a route on the other side of the Glass Museum then goes to the Tacoma Dome for passengers before going to Puyallup.

I have never owned a private car. I use public transportation, walk, or use a bicycle.

Warm Weather at The Fair

It was Military Appreciation Day and so hot it was like a horse show, Daffodil Arabians, I visited one year at this arena while I was reading "No Man's Land: Combat and Identity in World War One, by Eric J. Leed. During a break I read at one of the benches in a warm shade spot - then the presence of the horses began to reify some of what I was reading.

At the art show a picture, a meadowlark, reminded me of my father's sister. Art area sounds are not similar to the rural-residential roadside.

In the building with art and home crafts, an upstairs, I looked at place settings, then below the dais for the demo kitchen was a long table with pies. I had happened upon pie judging, a first. One judge was a woman columnist for the News Tribune, one was a novelist, one was a Pierce County Health Department representative. They had nineteen pies. An hour and a half later they had been watched eating pie, and three pies were laid out under the tipped up mirror with a red, blue and white ribbon.

I went on to a later draft horse demo than I had planned.

In my favorite place for the draft horse demo, in the warm weather, dirt on the arena floor faintly clouded the air. Each of the five draft teams rode a uniformed member of a section of the United States Military in the wagon, with applause.

Glorious Autumn Weather

I visited IKEA today and returned by taking a bus to Kent and then the Sounder Commuter Train to Tacoma. As the train went through Auburn and Sumner and Puyallup, in some areas the countryside can only be called all that is glorious in beauty - the greens and golds of shadows of trees and a field of beautiful plants growing. The fair is a joy to visit, I think of favorites like Grange produce displays, horses, the caged roosters or pigeons. So I have brought along two kinds of rye tack and a box of Anna's Gingersnaps, as well as shopping bags to use as totes. Today I also made a comment at the blog, Sharp Sand, referred to the Tad Bartimus column from Sunday's paper, listed at her web site, Tad Bartimus.com, as "Say So Long To Superwoman". I read a bit of her account of her work as a War Correspondent in Vietnam and found it quite interesting.

blackberries

I include a photo of a blackberry that remains along Thea Foss waterway. Today a story in the News Tribune

tells how a developer expects to remove growing produce from a site within a few weeks. Blackberries are pretty hardy, the blackberry canes develop fast and are thick. But the story is about agriculture, berries and pumpkins, the remaining growing things in Fife. It is sad that between two large cities, Seattle and Tacoma, farmland close at hand can no longer be present. Next Friday the Puyallup Fair begins, so many people are drawn to the experience that can no longer mean what it meant. The lost farmland is experienced as the drapery of grief - white in Japan, black in Western culture - grief for the actual removal of color. I think of songs - (I saw Bob Dylan perform at the Puyallup Fair one year) the song, "The Man in the Long Black Coat" or the Rolling Stones "Paint it Black". All that color and beauty gone. Others may experience the removal of developed produce as a deranged waste of food, in a time when the price paid is so high and it is so wrong to waste food. In this situation, the farmland is destroyed, so the loss of one crop, one season, cannot be evaluated when the actual time element is "gone forever".

A Swedish stamp shows art by Bror Hjorth, a portrait of Walt Whitman, Christ, and Socrates. I saw a relief by Bror Hjorth at Liljevalch's Konsthall that featured Walt Whitman when I visited Sweden in 1990.

There was some rain during some of the poetry readings at Showcase Tacoma. Some of the students hurried along the walkway beside the light rail tracks with flowing cloth painted in tie dye colors, a little like a dragon.

Showcase Tacoma

The state poet laureate Sam Green will be at Showcase Tacoma today. When the Urban Grace group reads poems I will also read one poem. Showcase Tacoma is at the U of W Tacoma Branch.