9-30 Market: A Crushing Blow

This week's sklog records a disastrous, emotionally devastating Farmer's Market last Saturday. I drew the picture in a driving rain storm, huddled under my cheap canopy, shivering and wet, occasionally throwing the sketchbook down to wipe the water off individual magnets, or obsessively move my display tables around in a hopeless attempt to avoid the water dripping all around the edges of the tent.

Occasionally one or two of the few crazed, drenched and hypothermic shoppers attending the market this day for their own incomprehensible reasons stopped by the booth to stare uncomprehendingly at the magnets for a moment or two before hurrying on.

The people who usually display interest in the magnets - lone shoppers, eerily quiet, with strangely intent eyes and alien mannerisms - were all at home cleaning their insect collections.

I discovered an amazing fact about the canopy - it provides less than half the cover - 49 square feet - as the more expensive canopies purchased by the serious market vendors - while claiming to be a 10' x 10' canopy. How? Inward-slanting poles, joining together under a meager patch of 7' x 7' fabric. Brilliant cost-saving device, unfortunately making it maddeningly difficult to determine what portions of the display under it would be safe from the rain.

At some point in the ordeal, staring across the gap where my northern neighbor Jim usually had his booth, at the welder who sells his idiotic metal 'U's to football fans, listening to the annoying chatter of the couple from the leather booth to the south, I suddenly became calm, and felt peace for the first time that morning, and decided that I would never do a booth at the Farmer's Market again. "No more," I said to my inner child, and wept, and curled into a ball in the comfortable canvas chair. I was a butterfly, and had to be free, and spending more Saturday mornings at home in bed.