The Water Fowl Festival

Chirp chirp

It’s unseasonably warm for November. This calls for an important extension in “talking about the weather” season. You can still talk about the weather when it’s cold out, but there’s not as much to say.

“It was so cold this weekend I barely left my house!”

“Me too!”

Fin.

70 degrees in Maryland in mid November is bittersweet. It’s always nice to have nice weather. But the endangered, hunted for her tusks, elephant in the room is that climate change is partially to blame for the weather. The other party at fault is people who think life begins at conception. Life begins when you attend your first concert without your parents. (Taylor Swift, Fearless tour, 2010).

So how do you celebrate a day in the sun when it’s shadowed by the dark reality behind its existence? 

It’s simple. You to go the water fowl festival in Easton, MD.

At the water fowl festival, time stands still. Vendors are selling fried clam strips, antique stores are brimming with rusty trinkets that your grandchildren will have to deal with throwing out when you die, and the local spice store has a tea for every ailment you are convinced you have.

We didn’t know that today was the water fowl festival, but you can’t ever be sure of such a thing. You can’t put a tracker on a winged bird. I’m getting word from our producers that you actually can do that, but that is none of my business.

It’s such a joy to walk in and out of stores and pick things up and put them down. I’ve been re-watching Mad Men and every time Don Draper pitches an ad campaign, it is always with the intention of getting someone into your store. How they behave once they’re in is up to you, small business owner. The Easton Water Fowl Festival- come for the window shopping, stay because you can’t find your car. 

Today, no advertisements drew us into stores, only the glass enclosed promise of wonder and mystique inside. Wooden ducks and consigned wedding dresses and faded maps of the Chesapeake bay watershed. We were lured in by the possibility of finding a hat that says “I’ve never been to the Kentucky Derby, but what if I owned a hat that lightly implied that I have.”

The only purchase I made today, besides an iced tea from a woman with great mascara, was a black tee shirt. The art is pictured below. 

Making sub-$30 purchases is so important in the face of climate doom and men who say things like “I’m just really confused right now.”

This isn’t a Tina Fey eating cake on SNL after the Charlottesville attack suggestion— quite the opposite. You need to have your role in the revolution. Whether you’re a policy maker, a performer, a doctor, or a normal person. On the Titanic you were either helping load the boats, playing violin, or sitting in the dining room with wet feet, denying that there even was a hole in the ship.

At the end of the day, sometimes all you can do is just buy a shirt. You’ll need clothes no matter what happens next. A tee shirt preferably. It’s only getting hotter.

The best thing I ate this week:

Was a cold chicken nugget out of the fridge, dipped in honey mustard. I live for sauces, dips, spreads, dressings, etc. One day I will open a fondue sort of restaurant where you bring whatever you want and I make all the sauces. It will be shut down by the health department so fast, but boy, what a thrill while it lasts.