Here’s a post I’ve been talking about for a little while. It’s a little visual peek into the local town fair that’s on every summer between August 15 and August 22. Many places in Spain have fairs around this time, because August 15 is a common holiday in the country (and other countries!) as the day of the Assumption of Mary. Many patron saints of towns are a Virgin Mary of some sort or another; ours is del Prado, which is my mom’s name.
On August 15, they take the sculpture down from where it stands in the cathedral, and it stays down for people to pay their respects until August 22. There are parades each day, and fireworks at the end of them; and then fireworks at midnight at the fair location.
It’s not particularly exciting, honestly, but a lot of it reminds me of my childhood. I used to love going on rides up until I was 11 or 12; I’m not sure what happened, but I’ve always still loved the fireworks. I remember families gathering at the bars, and I’m told there was a time when I was a little girl that my family went after the Witch Train ride when it set up around the province so I could ride it. I remember my grandfather spoiling me rotten and how they gave us free tickets at so many of the rides because he bought me so many.
I remember the swan stand because I was obsessed with it, though I can’t recall if I ever won anything! I didn’t do the fishing most of the time, anyway. There are a lot of target stands of various sorts, and a bingo tombola, and a bunch of other tombolas, and bars and — those are not really the things I remember fondly. For me, it was always the rides and the ice cream and the fireworks and the cotton candy. And the churros my grandfather or my parents bought.
My favorite ride as a kid was the baby Ferris wheel, and the Dragon, which I was too small for so my father usually rode with me.
I didn’t go to the fair for a few years when I was a teenager; I didn’t love going out with friends at night, and I relished the time alone when my parents and my sister went. Only for the past couple of years I’ve dragged my mom out to see the fireworks. It’s crowded, and I don’t really like rides anymore, and I’m painfully aware of how incredibly racist the mechanic bull rides are, and I wish I could deface them with graffiti, a desire I can honestly say had never crossed my mind before.
But still, there are fragments that stick. We look for them later and find them.
“Tears of things”: now that I’ve shed them, the line that most comes to me lately—
memory speaking in dactyls.— Maryann Corbett, A Meditation on Dactylic Hexameter.
(Buy her books — affiliate link, but she’s my favorite poet)
