I've decided to enter some of my canned goods into the county fair. There are several categories which sounds appealing and I've spent a great deal of time over the past day staring into my canning cupboard hoping to spot a sure winner. Right now, I'm considering key lime or cranberry chutney for the jam/fruit chutney category, marinated mushrooms for the pickles (or maybe the preserved lemons, that would be cool - but can you imagine a judge digging in to sample some?) and maybe one other thing but I can't remember what all the categories are at the moment.


I have no illusions that I might actually win a ribbon or anything (although, I have to confess that I'd be thrilled to do so) but I think it will be a fun experience. I've always enjoyed local fairs and as a child of the suburbs have found them somewhat mysterious, what with the livestock, pie eating competitions and C-list country music performances and all. I guess it's saying something that events at which you may procure one of those fried bread confections as well as a heifer are now pretty far out of the mainstream, although they were once a key joint in the backbone of rural life.


If, at age 18, I heard that not only would I be entering home canned produce (don't you have to cook that?) in the county fair but that I also would actually be looking forward to it, I would have run screaming in the opposite direction and may well have built myself a bunker out of Vogue back issues. At the time I couldn't imagine living in a small town, much less partaking of small town life and, for the most part, enjoying it. The very idea that I could actually, say, grow my own tomatoes as well as read the New York Times or cross-stitch my baby's (my what?) bibs as well as enjoy the latest club music, never ever crossed my mind. I thought life had to be one or the other, not both. I could be an urban sophisticate or I could be a backwater rube (not hard to tell where my prejudices lie, eh?). That there was a golden mean wherein I could forge my own path would have seemed as foreign as the landscape on Mars.


Such are the biases and narrowmindedness of youth and inexperience. I'm older and wiser now and don't feel I know I don't have to make such choices. Play the cello and hang my laundry? Yes. Spread hundreds of pounds of fertilizer and savor an iced chai latte? Yes. Grad school and small farming workshop? Yes. I know now that none of these choices excludes any of the others or even that partaking of any given one says anything at all about the person doing the partaking or life in which it is done. Why on earth did I have to reach my 30s to understand these things? The mind boggles.


And so to this I say, I may be bourgeois and I may be bohemian, but I'm also a bumpkin. And proud of it.