Michfest, Day 10

Michfest, Day 10
Current mood: content

Tarp Convention~

Today my crew finished up a few odds and ends. Dropped some furniture, put up a few small tents. Then, because we had the time, Dustin, Liz, and I returned to Oliver, the place where everything had started for me.

Oliver was a dirty, dirty barn. Old brown and blue tarps hung in fraying tatters from the ceiling, spilling leaves and mouse droppings and bat guano all over the floor. The three of us gave the barn a good sweeping, then began the task at hand.

Dustin and I climbed up on ladders with staple guns and systematically tarped the entire roof of the barn. In another world this task might have seemed tedious or tiring, holding a large staple gun over one's head for prolonged periods of time and stapling plastic into wood, but Dustin and I fell into a groove with it while Liz held the tarps up for us. It was just coincidence, I think, that Dustin and I were handed this task, but it felt so right to me that we return here. We, who a week ago had entered Oliver as awkward newbies, now had the chance to see our first big task come to completion. How very satisfying.

But it was more than that. All the work we had done up to that point had been for this year's festival goers. Delivering wood, moving the scaffold, bringing furniture, all these tasks were part of the cyclical festival constructs that would all come down again and go back into storage where it would lie dormant until next year. But this, a barn with a shining plastic ceiling (with a particularly nice orange tarp amongst the blue, I might add) was something that we were doing not for the festies, but for the Lace crew that would follow ahead of us. So we could breathe a little easier when we moved the wood again. I saw myself opening the red barn doors next year and marveling over our handiwork from the year before. The thought of coming back to this barn again and again kept me smiling along the winding dirt road that led us back home.