A love letter to my county fair

“It’s fair week” was the explanation for everything from forgotten items to crabby kids, seeing long-time friends to sweaty hugs. It was always said with a shake of the head, a sideways grin, or a shrug of the shoulders.

But, I think, fair week is about family. Sure, the kind you’re born with but also the kind you make. You learn to roll with being hot, dirty, and tired and keep a polite word and a helping hand reaching out for the people alongside you. For some exhibitors, it is the only show, the only set of ribbons, they will earn in a year. For others, it is one show of many but different somehow because it belongs to them, the hometown show.

County fairs teach you to embrace adversity and fall in love with hard work rewarded with a hand shake, a livestock auction check, maybe a belt buckle (if you’re at the top of your game that day). You are taught to network, to volunteer, to educate, to share, to be who you are at your best and your worst.

Maybe that is why my family is devoted to the Grant County fair. I take a week off from my off-farm jobs to be at the fair as the superintendent for the agriculture building and my family, by extension, does too.

While tidying up the debris from a week of produce displays and ag outreach, my mom said, “Fairs are meant to be participated in. That is how you learn to love them.” My maternal grandma was a superintendent at the fair, my maternal grandpa’s name graces a horse arena, my mom has been a 4-H mom and grandma, livestock show cheerleader, and champion for helping out wherever she is needed during any given day. The legacy of my family at the fair is in the hours spent volunteering and footsteps left on barn floors.

It takes a village, an army, a Fair Family to put on our fair. The generosity of the community that buys animals at the auction; the service groups who host food booths, clean the grounds, monitor the gates; the staff who work untold hours year-round to make the grounds functional; the exhibitors, without whom there would be no fair.

So, while I think of the fair as mine, I am grateful to reflect on the fair family I am humbled to be a small part of.