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Cheryl Hughes: I Was Told There Would Be Fun

I slept eleven-and-one-half hours on Saturday night, and still had to force myself to get out of bed on Sunday morning.  When my husband, Garey, and I pulled into our driveway at 7 p.m. on Saturday evening, I fed my dogs, fed my cat, watched as Garey counted money at the kitchen table then crashed.

            We set up at the Glendale Crossing Festival—just outside E-Town—at 5 a.m. on Saturday morning.  The festival draws an estimated 25,000 people each year, and every one of them is there to shop.  We sold stuff I was sure would sell, as well as stuff I wasn’t sure would ever sell.  It was a very prosperous day, but I could barely move my legs by the time we got everything loaded back into the car.

            The elderly couple set up next to us brought nearly twice the inventory we did. The woman was a remarkable artist.  They sold paintings, barn wood signs, walking sticks, and other primitives.  As we were packing up, I asked how long they had been setting up at the festival—this was our first year.  “Years,” she answered, “We have a lot of fun doing this.”

            My friend, Sandra, who taught me the whole repurposed glass trade, offers the same sort of sentiment.  “I don’t get rich off of this,” she says, “But I have a lot of fun.”

            On the way home, as I laid my pounding head back against the head rest, adjusted the Velcro brace on my throbbing right knee, and put my frozen feet up against the car’s heater, I turned to Garey and asked, “What am I missing?”

            I asked the question because the whole process of loading and unloading, setting up and breaking down, freezing or burning up, and going on little or no sleep has never been my definition of “fun.”  Don’t get me wrong.  I don’t have an aversion to hard work.  I understand the principal of production.  It’s like Maya Angelou said, “If you don’t work, nothing else will.”

            Garey had a ready answer to my “what am I missing” question.

            “Most of the people who do this don’t live the secondary life you do,” he said.  “Think about what the past two weeks have been like for you.  Let’s review:  The last of the peppers and okra came in, so you spent time canning and freezing those.  Natalie just took the new job with Vanderbilt, so the responsibility for feeding, dressing, transporting and arguing with Sabria has fallen on your shoulders.  You cooked dinner every night then cleaned up the mess.  You’ve done 99% of the laundry and 100% of the housework.  Thank God, this isn’t the summer or you’d have been out there mowing the yard.  You’ve had to wash the bottles, decal the bottles, drill the bottles—and the bricks—load the bottles into the kiln then unload the bottles from the kiln, all while trying to keep a three-year-old from getting in the middle of everything.  You have to wear a knee brace on your bum knee so it won’t pop out of place while you’re carrying bottles back and forth to the kiln, and you do all this on very little sleep because of your back and leg pain.  And you wonder why this isn’t fun?  Really?”

 

            I sat in stunned silence.  I’d never had everything I do in a week’s time recounted to me.  I came to two important realizations that evening: One, I make a lot of stuff happen, even if I’m not having fun; Two, I married Garey Hughes because of his ability to put things into perspective.   

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