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SAGE ADVICE: A fool for the fair

For three days and nights my wife worked. She pricked her fingers with pins and needles. She went without sleep at night and soldiered through the next days with those hollow zombie eyes, cooking food and making sure the boys stayed reasonably clean, as clean as any 4- and 5-year-old needs to stay during summer break. She measured their bodies while they slept. And once, that I know of, she trotted up above the garden with a ruler to get readings on Fools, the goat eating the tree line up there.
Along about the third sleepless night, I told my wife I was sorry just before I slipped off to bed.
See the jester costume idea was mine. Several weeks before the Bland County Fair, before the sleepless nights, before the zombie-eyed evenings of watching big horses drag even bigger weights, she asked how we should dress the boys for the goat costume show.
I think I first said something like, “Huh?”
Then, after a fair amount of consideration, I said, “A jester, of course.”
And thus it started – the needles and pins to the fingers, the sleepless nights, the measuring of animals that God never intended to be wearing hats, shirts and puffy collars.
Most nights she made it to bed before my alarm sounded, but not by much. I could tell it in the way her eyelids went heavy whenever she sat down. I could tell it by the way she looked at me and said, “I didn’t get to sleep until 5 o’clock this morning.”
Then, the day the costume was made and done, came the fair. Though it might be the most fun weekend of the year, it’s also incredibly stressful somehow. Funny I don’t remember those stressful parts being there when I was a kid. All I remember is eating whatever fair food was before everyone started making blooming onions and curly potatoes and such and riding rides that didn’t always look anchored all that soundly.
I’m exhausted. Three days of faithful fair attendance just about did me in. If I don’t see another blooming onion for another 362 days, it’s fine by me. If I don’t see my son riding a sack down a sliding board for another year, I think I’ll be OK. If I don’t see my other son running full force into what looks like the mouth of a big giant worm and emerge a few seconds later from that big giant worm’s butt ever again – that one’s a little disturbing –  I won’t cry. If it takes another year before I cheer people on lawn mowers pulling incredibly heavy weights, I’ll be all right. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy every second of the fair. Most days we opened it up and shut it down. It’s just that I’m spent. And I know if I’m exhausted, she has to be at least a little tired. After all, she spent the same three days at the fair and the previous three days working on son and goat costumes.
Though our sons may never know what went into making three days of fun, I do. I know that she took care of two boys by day and by night made costumes that more than likely no one will ever wear again, won’t remember and will never know of the sleepless darkness they were stitched under. And I know that she did it without once frowning, complaining or thrusting a pair of scissors into my chest area. Because that’s what mothers do, and there isn’t anyone better at that than her.