Smores and a Circus

More Smores. With a couple little friends over, we watched the bats swoop crazily low and loaded up on sugar 20 minutes before bedtime. It's pictures like these that I will look at to feel better about the state of things come mid-January when the ground is frozen white and absolutely nothing is growing except a few paltry houseplants.

And that scrappy, dark, out-of-focus picture of a tiny woman on an elephant?
Well, we also had a circus come to our fair city yesterday. My daughter has been able to read for a few years now, but she usually seems fairly oblivious to signs around us. However, thanks to good promoting, she's been bugging the crap out of us for two weeks asking, is it August 7th yet?!
I really hemmed and hawed over going. After all, circus animals depress me to no end. When I was nine I went to Barnum and Bailey at Joe Louis Arena. It was a very glamorous thing to go to downtown Detroit at nighttime and I was very excited. But as soon as I saw the guy walking behind the elephants with a sharp pointed metal stick, it dawned on me that living in the circus must really suck compared to living in a jungle in Asia. From that point on, I think I spent the rest of the circus watching the faces of the animals and wishing I could hatch some heroic escape plan for them all. God knows where they'd go to from Joe Louis Arena.
(Speaking of Joe Louis, did I ever mention that my grandfather was a non-successful boxer? Story goes that he got into the ring with the Joe Louis and was pummeled. Our family still holds onto that with pride. It doesn't matter that he was pummeled, he got to be in the ring with Joe.)

At any rate, the other Aagh! Factor of going to the circus is the price. I knew it wouldn't be cheap. Times are tight right now. My husband's job is connected with The Big (or growing smaller) 3, and July is our slimmest month due to many days of being called off work for there being no work. This is largely in part of "summer shut down"-- when the plants close down to re-do the lines for the next year's models. And then there's me. The big MANA conference is in October in Traverse City and my midwifery partner and I are on the planning committee. This means we'll both be in Traverse. This means we had to block out an entire month of taking any clients to insure that we could be pretty much off call for those 4 days without interruption.
So we're definitely feeling the crunch.

But we have to go to the circus, Mom!

Okay. We called friends to see who was coming. All the mamas seemed to take a big breath and say, Hell with it, we'll go. It better be good.
We packed our backpacks with water bottles and threatened the kids not to ask for anything. No popcorn, toys, light up, poke-your-eye-out rotating flashlights, and no elephant rides!
And we started walking to the park.
I must say it felt really, really good to see just how many families live in Ypsiville. Because it's a small college town, it always feels like the halfway house residents and college kids out-number the families and children. I joked with a friend that walking down the hill towards the Big Tent looked like a scene from Music Man. Very wholesome and happy.
It cost us $36 for the 4 of us to enter. As I was forking over my very hesitant cash, we noticed a small horse laying on the ground. To my knowledge, horses don't normally lay on the ground in direct sunlight.
"Has that horse foundered?" I asked my farm-escapee friend.
"Hmmm, doesn't look good, does it? I had a horse that liked to lay down for naps, but not many of them do."

It felt like a bad sign, seeing that young horse laying down. But to our surprise, it was a pretty darn good circus! More people-centric than animal. Really only a few dogs, 3 elephants and 2 horses in the show. Of course there was the intermission elephant rides that I absolutely refused to pay for which caused my daughter to brood for the entire 15 minutes. The smaller kids were great and stayed in their seats most of the time.

We left feeling good. We also left the tent to find a huge storm rolling in. Beautiful gray clouds and strong, cold winds. Lovely! It's been so dry this past month. The front yard is yellow from all the grass dying. The coneflowers are blackened from being sun scorched. We weren't 5 minutes walking distance from the circus when the downpour began. The kids laughed and screeched and we ran home, completely soaked. The rain only lasted 20 minutes or so, but it was really heavy. Things are looking a little greener this morning. And the garden finally got a good soaking.

Good times, after all.