At the Corner of Fourth and Beet Street…

Ahh, the joys of late summer harvest. The refrigerator fills up with all the veggies we don’t eat quickly, waiting for the right recipe to come along. Despite my best efforts we reached the crisis point this week. That led to my pulling out the food processor and feeding it all the beets I’ve been collecting from the CSA. I washed and shredded them into fine purple strips, then I boiled them in anticipation of repeating last year’s glorious success with beet dyeing. The kitchen took on an unfamiliar odor that led my younger son to enter only with his nose firmly clamped shut. The next day I strained out the beet shards and popped in my washed wool roving and warmed it up. I had visions of the beautiful deep tint of red that emerged last year and found its way into so many of the ornaments I made. Sadly, out came an unremarkable beige/yellow blob of roving. What went wrong? Beets me!

The Fourth Street Festival of the Arts is also approaching. I serve as the vice president of the group that runs the show and things get hectic as Labor Day weekend approaches. This year the show will expand its footprint, with artists on Fourth Street all the way from the fire station to the campus. Both Grant and Dunn will close adjacent to the show this year, with all the arts-related organizations and music still set up on Grant. The additional space let us design a Fair that will be easier for everyone to navigate, with spaces between every third or fourth booth to allow access to the sidewalks and restaurants. Of course the new layout needs to be put into place and not just drawn on paper, since one always seems to encounter unexpected space glitches in practice. So David Goodrum, our inestimable president, Kyle Spears and I spent Friday morning marking out the show on the road. It’s going to work! I’m excited about the new layout and I think you will be too if we cross paths at the fair this year.

The last big news of the week relates to my schedule—it really opened up! The boys started back at school at Rogers (Jacob) and Binford (Tommie). We rode bikes or scootered in every day this week, which we all like to do. My focus has shifted back to making art and getting ready for Fourth Street. I also got to have lunch out twice this week, once on Fourth Street business and once with a friend from Indianapolis (Hi Erin!). I’ve even started to notice the garden again. The deer have munched down a lot of the HoA’s flowers, including his prized dahlias, and some critter had the audacity to chomp on the first of my ripe cherry tomatoes! The princess is not amused. The flowers, however, were not defeated. One of the sunflowers that was beheaded earlier in the year released apical dominance and set out an axial flower bud. It’s a little yellow flower full of character and determination, even if it isn’t a classic sunflower. It’s most welcome in our garden.

Until next week…