Slightly Off Center

After 2021's blistering weekend, when they closed the show a day early, we monitored the weather forecast closely coming up to last weekend's Roseburg show. Especially as Denise would be joining me for the weekend. (In 2022 she was just six weeks out from her knee surgery, so I was sweating it out solo.)

As it turned out, the weather was lovely. Cool and overcast until noon, then sunny and mild the rest of the day. The hottest it got, Sunday afternoon, was only a smidge over 80°. Perfect art fair weather.

Last year I was surprised how well I did in only two days, assumed it was because no one in their right mind was planning on coming out Sunday anyway. It was my best UVA Summer Arts Festival ever.

Until this year.

My shows tend to become heavily front-loaded after a while. Long-time customers start coming early, knowing they'll get the best selection before the stock gets picked over. So while other vendors are just starting to warm up, I'm doing land-office business. This year even more so. We were within a thousand dollars of last year's total on Friday alone. Saturday was only a couple of hundred off Friday, and though Sunday was much slower, we still cleared nearly $4400 for the weekend. In little, rural Roseburg.

Part of it is a good match between the place and my work. Roseburg is rural enough that people really get the animal art, urban enough that they have income to buy it with. A lot of it is persistence; I've been coming to this show for well over two decades now, and my work tends to attract repeat custom. I have people who come every year to pick up a piece or two--or a wagon full. The woman who's been buying a place setting a year decided to get three this year, to complete her 12-place set. (So I won't see you again? I ask, mock-mournfully. Oh no, she replies, Next year I start getting serving dishes.) The mother of a 10-place setting owner I shipped to in Texas during the pandemic shows up with a bunch of post-it notes, and eventually gets him on video chat to pick out a few extra pieces. Elizabeth tools up in her mobility scooter to chat, and takes home another dessert plate.

Some sales are perfect: the girl with the vinyl shark back pack, who falls in love at first sight with the Great White Shark dessert plate. The couple looking for a mug for her mother, who admires the cow-and-calf tall mug daughter got last year. I don't have another, but I do have a bison and calf mug. Omigod, it's perfect! She just got back from Yellowstone!

And a young woman steps into the booth and says, Do you remember me? I bought a piece of your pottery years ago.

And I do remember her. She was the little girl who walked into my booth and declared, I love this store! This is my favorite store! And then convinced her grumpy, Russian-speaking grandmother to buy her a bowl.

I ask how she'd doing these days: She's bought a house in Winston, is going to school at the community college, studying criminal justice. Doing well.

And just as we're saying goodbye, grumpy Russian grandma comes around the corner to catch up with her and take her away again.