The little weather icon on the bottom of my computer screen kept popping up Monday morning telling me it was “only” 84 degrees. I don’t trust it very much. Either it is incorrect or 84 degrees is much hotter in 2022 than it was in any previous year.
Smothering hot!
Smothering hot, and according to the weather prognosticators on the morning and evening news it is going to get even hotter, with more smothering in it, by the end of the week.
What’s up with that?
Oh, a quick glance at the calendar answers that question...the Neshoba County Fair starts this weekend. You can always count on some smothering hotness, dust, rain, mud — you name it, a little bit of everything — when it is Neshoba County Fair Week.
We plan to skip it this year and fortunately for us our daughter’s, and her friends’ plans to board at our house and commute the short distance up Highway 21 to the fairgrounds fell through too. Somebody wipe the sweat from my forehead everything is going to be alright!
Fair week is always special for us in a different kind of way. We get to experience all the roadblock excitement just about every time we leave the house and come back home.
To law enforcement’s credit, they have moved the Highway 21 “drunk check” a few feet up the highway from our road the last couple of times they have set up.
It used to be that we got our license checked when we turned onto Pine Grove Road to go home and again when we left Pine Grove Road headed to make a drop off of the young people at the fair.
On the reverse trip we got checked again and when it was time to head back toward Philadelphia to pick those same young folks back up we got checked again....and then again.
Seems like they would get used to us sooner or later.
Somewhere I’ve got a photograph from the fair roadblock several years back where the officers had pulled a fellow over — several fellows if memory serves me correctly — and he was leaning up against the patrol car playing the guitar. First roadblock with entertainment I’ve ever been through. Last one too!
Wife Danny and I got married during the fair 41 years ago next week. The wedding party’s bachelor and bachelorette parties were at Founder’s Square on Saturday night and come Sunday afternoon we all gathered at Sebastopol Methodist Church before a packed house (it’s a small sanctuary) and said our “I dos” before heading over to the Sebastopol Baptist Church Fellowship Hall for a reception with cake and punch. After that we all headed to my parents house in Newton for a second reception and yard party. Fun times.
Danny and I went on our honeymoon to the Smoky Mountains and made it back home just in time for the last night of the fair. That was dedication.
Neshoba, the one word name my daughter and her friends call the fair, just doesn’t appeal to us like it used too. The last time we actually entered the gates was many years ago. I mean many years, and I think Danny and I both agreed then that the air was thicker and hotter than it had ever been.
Now here we are in 2022 with the thickest, hottest, smothering air I think there has ever been and diehard fair goers will be burning up the highway for the next week or so just to burn up. I hope it is everything they hope it will be for as long as their young bodies will hold out.
I was about to say that I miss those days, but then I looked back down at the temperature on this lying, no good computer and I think better of myself for opting out of that sticky Neshoba mud, red dirt and dust, and prickly wood chips stuck between my toes.
But, hey, you all enjoy it just the same!
