Friday, March 8, 2013

The Indiana Flower and Patio show

After spending many days twisting up bundles of pussywillows after cutting them from the trees and warming them up, relatively speaking, in my shop close to the fire, I loaded them up and took them to the west pavilion of the Indiana State Fairgrounds. There I stocked my friend Pam Parker's cut flower booth ( JP Parker). She will sell them for the very reasonable price of five dollars a bundle. I took over five hundred bundles today and I will take 700 more bundles next week. That is after I cut them from their trees. Normally, this is not as difficult as it has been this year. Usually we have a blast of spring weather before the show, but not this year. Also, last year's drought killed or damaged a lot of the trees I have depended upon for years. The crazy desperate madness that is the final hour or two before the noon deadline on Friday, dust and mulch airborne, bobcats swirling everywhere to clean up the place and make it the finely tuned beautiful ode to spring that the Flower and Patio Show is, always makes me feel a part of a great enterprise reaching fruition. I spent several hours jostling for a place to unload my goods and carrying bundle after bundle in. It is hard to believe the level of work that it takes to build all the beautiful gardens and displays. Soon 110,000 people will visit. Fortunately, I do not have to be present all 96 hours of the show. I will bring two more loads to the show. I returned to cutting more pussywillows today, dragging them into the shop to warm them up so they will blossom out more. Hopefully, Nature will give me a hand this week. At the same time I did all this, I also dropped off a couple of chairs and a table to Stonycreek farms booth for them to use in their Garden display. To me this whole deal makes me feel like a part of a great enterprise that goes on year after year. Driving back down Fall Creek Drive, I was able to feel a great relief that I had managed to do it again. What a joy!!!

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