Seeing Clearly

It's time for a Sabbatical.

Friends…it’s been a few weeks.

If you read my last post about the fair, you might be able to imagine what the weeks between then and now might have looked like.

Oh, to hell with imagining. Let me paint the picture for you…

Yes, that’s us, our family of eight wearing our crumpled red “PA Dutch Foods” uniform shirts, stumbling up the back walkway of the Maryland State Fair in the 9 o’clock moonlight, smelling faintly of stale butter and toasted bread. The girls’ ponytails are sagging, the boys’ hats are cocked back on their heads to the cooling breeze of the evening.

Depending on the night, we might be laughing about one of our children eating questionable bits of food off our shop floor in exchange for a crisp $10 bill or the piano player who the fair management hired to sit upon on a platform that rolls him around the fairgrounds every night singing enthusiastically off-key for the better part of 3 hours. Yep, we might be in fits of laughter about that.

But again, it depends on the night.

There are plenty of evenings that we just keep our heads down and shuffle out to the parking lot, completely ignoring the 80’s cover band that performs from the small stage beside our walkway, singing to an audience of 14 on a good night, 5 on a typical. Our minds are on our aching backs or aching feet or homework that’s due tomorrow or laundry that still needs to be done tonight or the hour drive home that we’re not exactly sure how we’ll stay awake for.

These evening scenes played out in one way or another, again and again in Groundhog’s Day fashion for 5 weeks. And then two Sundays ago, it ended. Shawn and his faithful clean-up crew packed up all our tables and equipment, shoved them into a storage trailer, and the fair was done.

And now we begin “normal” life again.

Every year, at the end of the weeks and weeks of 12 hour days, non-stop action, being steeped in our own sweat and the fragile tempers of hundreds of customers, we step back into this normality of life with a sense of wonder.

Sitting down at our dining room table for an evening meal together feels novel. Napping on the couch? Luxurious. Attending our kids’ soccer practices and football games is a delightful treat. It’s the stepping away from all these activities for five weeks that gives them a new glow. Or maybe, it’s simply that our lenses have been cleaned and we can see clearly again.

The sunset during one of our babe’s soccer practices. No filter. Just nature being its gorgeous self.

And speaking of seeing clearly, I’ve been a bit foggy over the past several months about what I want this space here on Substack to look like. I want there to be time in my everyday life for me to write, edit, and share work here with you, but I’m seeing clearly that this perhaps isn’t the season for it. At least, it isn’t the season for regulary scheduled postings like I’ve done in the past.

With that in mind, I’m turning off the paid subscriptions here for a while until I have something worth offering to you and something worth your reading of it. We have a group here at our bookshop called The Creatives, and we just finished reading Maggie Smith’s Dear Writer. So much of Smith’s encouragement begins from a place of play. We are our best creative selves when we give ourselves permission to play, with no expectations, no one looking over our shoulders, no deadlines to meet.

I see that I’m hungry for that kind of time with my writing. I want to close my self up in my little personal playroom and just…create. So that’s what I’ll be up to for the next several months. I may still pop on here from time to time to share something I’ve particularly enjoyed making, but it won’t be regular.

Till then, friends, I wish you each plenty of time and space in your own creative playrooms, doing whatever it is that brings you delight.

Hugs to all of you!

xoxo Maile