The morning ride east to Bethlehem was uneventful and I enjoyed the pink sunrise which spread across the tree-lined horizon. I tried to keep my speed within limits, as I am increasingly conscious of the fact that human reflexes and response times diminish with age, and I have plenty of that -- age. Traffic was light and the cloud cover dissipated long enough for us to have a nice first day to the garlic festival. The selling was brisk, with falling leaves in the air, and a bagpipe and drum band doing the rounds.

This year, thankfully, the guy in the leather kilt was playing his violin somewhere else down the midway, out of earshot. He cannot play the tortured instrument but has figured out that the crowd cannot hear more than one song at a time as they pass by. He wears knee-high, black leather, hob-knobbed boots and an inexplicable feathered William Tell wool hat, utterly incongruous to, and unmatching to, his black and grey herringbone wool vest. And that’s good for them -- the paying guests -- because I swear he knows only one song, and hits only half the notes at that. His unwavering persistence is torture for any discerning vendor withing earshot.

At these festivals, vendors are often stationed in the same booth space year after year and you get to know the vendors next to you. It is the only time in life you will ever see them and, as such, a strange “what’s your name, again?” comradery develops. The booth to my left is occupied by a small family, an Asian woman and her Caucasian husband and their teenage son. The son grew like a foot since last year, and when I said so, his face lit up like the sun. Children orbiting close to their parents are kind of invisible in this country, and when an outside adult notices them individually, such acknowledgement often leads to a strange mixture of self-awareness coupled with embarrassment wrapped in appreciation -- part of that difficult teen-life I left long ago, but struggle to keep as reference within me. From Mystic, they drive up to the festival in a big black truck full of their wares. The father is something of a chemist and the wife’s business started with boiling hickory-bark in sugar, then draining off the hickory syrup. His sense of chemistry has branched them off into a full product line of syrups including blueberry syrup and, god forbid, black garlic syrup. He developed a “Tick me Off” soap for humans to use after hiking in tick infested areas. I brought home a bar for my wife, who is often found in infested environments, and, as I live with her, such infestations are not limited to ticks. Mixed with numerous saponified inert oils, he has concocted a soap with citronella, lavender, thyme, and geranium oils. Under normal weather conditions, the family does well, as, aside from the soap, sugar is America’s favorite food group.

Let’s not get carried away. The “pink in the morning” warning was creeping in on us before the end of the day and the forecast for Sunday was gruesome. The following morning, we set up for the day, and all was fine for about an hour. Then the rain moved in, the remnants of the Florida panhandle hurricane. We were grateful the winds were minimal. The crowds were hearty and engaging, for a time, and then the rain was heavy. Repeatedly, everything on my tables became wet, soaked, so I gave up trying to dry things out and resigned myself to living with it. I would dry out what remained of the garlic the next day. Cold, wet garlic likes to start growing.

I have to laugh at these people with umbrellas that lean into the booth, bringing their umbrella under the canopy and draining it onto the honey jars and garlic like they’re so unaware there might be something crawling up their leg and they wouldn’t know. The rain drips from the canopy of the booth onto their umbrella and the shedding rain is transported inside the booth to my tabletops like a blood transfusion, or a saline drip.

The festival closed two hours early. The weather was heavy. All the boxes of garlic riding in the back of my Tacoma had to be sealed in plastic bags. I moved slowly, having sore feet and nowhere to go.

I began to think what the world would be like if the weather was like this all the time. Two out three of my biggest festivals were brutal. An older couple down the aisle selling photographs of birds have had three bad events in a row, one vender they know earning only twelve dollars for the event. What would it be like if the sun did not shine, if the winds were incessant? Historians generally agree that the year 536 CE was the worst year ever recorded for humans. The sun did not shine eighteen straight months. Markets were empty. People starved, or they died of diseases they otherwise would have been able to survive. I was thinking how delicate everything is, how in balance, and how simple it would be for everything to go out of kilter. I’m a lucky guy. So far. And, even as I struggled, and my hands were red with the newly arrived cold, and my jacket wet, and my feet in turmoil, I thought, this is nothing.