Life is rich

I spent Saturday at my first ever renaissance faire <--spelled with an 'e'), which they now call a festival... which I don't understand since everybody knows that every renaissance thingy is exponentially better when words end in an 'e' or have a random 'y' substituted for an 'i'.

Hmmmm.

It makes me wonder if 'womyn' has some sort of renaissance faire-type association. Wouldn't surprise me... of course all the lesbians I know from the 'womyn' era are kinda fantastically hippy, and the folks there were dressed in poofy hemp skirts too, so it makes sense.

The day was, by the way, just... grand. Shall I describe it to you? Of course I shall! I was kind of worried about the day at the beginning, actually. It's funny, 'cos it turned out so pleasant!

Saturday Morning:

I was running late to get at our meeting place at 10am *sharp*. I had forgotten about the annual frat-boy beer drinking festival that crosses the road I take to get there. As luck would have it, there were police traffic folks and I was only 5 minutes late (praise the goddess) because...

-- insert foreboding music and dimming of lights here --

I arrived to a cloud of gloom. Oy! Grumpy and grumpier were acting out a comedy of caffeine withdrawal and cat-puke despair. Everybody was late. No one was speaking to each other. No one had eaten. Someone had tracked cat puke onto the rug. Eeeeeek!

Luckily the late folks arrived just in time to diffuse the situation before the black hole of despair consumed us all (plus they wanted to stop and get coffee, so everyone was happy).

Soon we were underway, there was even low giggling and sharing of foodstuffs.

Saturday Afternoon:

We arrived to a reminder that mother nature is the boss of us.

A tumultuous thunderstorm crashed down upon us the moment we pulled into the parking lot. There were five of us in the car and mama nature was hurling huge thumb-sized drops of rain at us. Hard! There was lightning and thunder and only one of us had an umbrella! We were stuck, all five of us, in a vehicle parked in a big mud puddle muttering "it'll blow over" like a mantra under our breaths... when Madonna spoke to us through the speakers.

So.

With approximately 4 minutes to save the world (or so they say), the group of tightly packed bodies spontaneously busted a move. Which is difficult in a Saturn sedan, but I am here to say is quite possible.

Anyway, apparently the simultaneous show of optimism pleased the universe, because the rain lilted into a soft mist, everyone was happy and laughing and the day picked up the black cloud that had been floating over her and decided to wear it as a cape!

There were folks in renaissance era garb, folks wearing rugs as skirts in an attempt to mimic renaissance era garb, a hilarious man on stilts in a horse costume and a fabulous acrobatic woman in green tights with the moon phases tattooed on her back. There may or may not have been a significant consumption of ale from plastic cups. The pulled-pork pita was both memorable and delicious, as was the intense lady who pulls sound out of her drum. There was the hippy couple that plays the lute and sings "bring us in good ale, good ale/bring us in good ale! Pour a cup for the lady's sake, and bring us in good ale!"and the fried bread with cherries on top, and a woodcut of a stag and a raven and a mermaid. Those things, with a backdrop of cool air and twitters of sunshine and mist and old friends laughing together.

Saturday Evening:

The very best part of the day though, for me, was the short trip afterward to the bluffs.

The gentle field with wisps of tall grasses and prairie flowers like on little house on the prairie plunged suddenly into the soft insistent grey of Lake Ontario, with a sun like a brandy-soaked peach on fire behind it. There was this peninsula-like outcropping that apparently a person used to be able to walk out onto. It was called 'the spine' and had eroded into flesh colored rivulets of earth descending toward the water. It looked like an old woman with pendulous breasts washing her hair in the ocean to me.

I laid there looking at the water and the clouds back lit by that intensely orange sun and the grey-blue sky while friends tossed stones down the cliff trying to make them into the water and talked... and then a few of us walked down to the water to skip stones and feel Ms. Ontario lap at our toes. There was an alone-together sort of moment down by the water, where three women skipped stones on the soft grey surface of the waves, and then we went in. Yep. I met a personal goal. I took my ginormous soon-to-be-smaller breasts for their last skinny-dip. The water was soft and the waves huge and body-lifting and just warm enough to be exhilarating without being freezing. And the best part was that, with hoots and hollers and laughter and glee, each of us peeled back a layer and just... were. It felt really *really* good.

Have you ever had the chance to see a glimpse of joy in the face of people you'd really like to see happy? Take them skinny dipping at the bluffs. Seriously. Life is too short not to.