The FleaMarket

I spent the last two days at a craft fair-flea market selling my wares, which this time consisted of small ikons on two by three inch canvases, nature-themed; and dioramas in old cigar boxes. One I truly love and didn't sell has a nest and eggs that never hatched, small bits of poetry, and a porcelan doll's head the same size as a redstart's egg. I put the whole nest of the redstart and two eggs in the box, then, I found amongst my broken jewelry a gold-toned leaf about two inches long and I pinned that into the nest as if it it were wind-blown. Last year I pressed and dried a lot of feverfew and so I entwined a number of these into the nest as well. I have a series of antique bird studies and I color copied them all, so the redstart is standing on her nest and then I found in a dictionary from the late 1800s, a study of the cukoo bird and the story of how the cukoo always kicks an egg out of another bird's nest and lays one of her own in its place, so I placed the doll's head which is egg-shaped and so delicate and faintly colored, with the other eggs and it looked just like I meant it to. All the cigar boxes have slots for a wooden cover and I took them out and had them replaced with glass.

My foxglove dropped so much seed last year that I couldn't harvest and it's coming up , so I've troweled them up into four by four pots and sold them for fifty cents. I wish my son would come over and teach me how to put photographs on my blog, so I could show you all this talk. It's so beautiful, all these images...

I traded a larger ikon of a study on Wallace Stevens' poem "Ten Ways of Looking At A Blackbird" for an apron with appliques on it and a quilt from the thirties with very few torn squares.The woman wanted to do the trade so very much, I could tell she hadn't much money. It's pattern was the postage stamp. I hope I can fix them. I wish I could send it to my mother, it's something she would adore, but that's one of the grievances of being an orphan.

Listening to vendors and customers around me barter was a show. I have never done that before.
I laughed with my neighbor vendor about it and she said, "I love it; the customer loves it and it makes the day go." So when I was all packed up and my husband was putting my things in the back of the truck, I took five dollars and walked the faire. I hadn't had time before. I was determined to learn how to barter and I did! A woman had an antique lace collar with white thin thin gloves that had a thin line of brilliantines up the center of the back of the hand and they fit, but both items are stained. Now, I'm an expert at getting stains out, using a lot of old fashioned remedies, depending on what the stain looks like, so she wanted $5 and I didn't want to pay five plus do all the work and besides, I only had five, I wanted to play awhile. So I pointed out the stains and I said, "How about three?" She went for it. Success on my first attempt. Then I found a brass cigarette case which are excellent for making small handmade books in and the woman wanted a dollar, but it was definately too much, so I just walked away. She said before I got far, she would take fifty cents. Sold! This is fun I thought to myself. The final thing I bought was a small plastic (boo) baggie of broken jewelry which is what i like the best. And then I was out of money. The jewelry guy said, "I just undersold my daughter stuff, she's gonna kill me." I replied, "Yeah, but yr doin' her work" and he said back, "Yeah, while she's gone to get me a cup of coffee." That one I felt a little off about, but I had already made the deal, and maybe that's his way of working, to play Eoyore...

It was a strange day of hot and cold and windy. One poor man had two small wardrobes standing up and one sold for a hundred dollars and the wind knocked it backward, breaking it terribly. The woman wanted her money back. Of course he gave it to her. It was too battered to think it could be fixed. What a shame when history and hand-crafted work is destroyed in an instant.

I was glad to come home. Each day I only made fifty or sixty dollars and we need so much more. But at least my check from the college library came for the poetry reading. That hundred ducats shall come in mighty handy. I hate worrying about money. I'd rather be like the lilies and neither toil nor spin and NOT WORRY. We're down to twenty lbs of short grain brown rice, though I have about 20 packs of rice noodles. Discovering how to cook Thai which is a rice based culture has made having Celiac's a whole lot easier. I think after church tomorrow I will take a very long nap to make up for having to get up at six two mornings in a row and haul ass down in the truck to the sale lot. It's a rough way to make a living when yr as beat up as my body is, though I'm not complaining. I'm not! I'd much rather do this hunt and peck than go back to teaching, which I loved, but just couldn't take in the long hours any more with this body.

In a week or two I think I read in Sacramento and that will be a good help as well. Well, I've talked myself into feeling better and now to b-e-d.