Authored by Tam – posted a bit late …

The Great Minnesota Get-together wound down yesterday, while I cleaned my bathroom.

Karen and I love the fair – walking through barns full of chickens and ducks and goats, oh my! Our dream of owning land with a few egg-layers and milk-givers never seems so real as when we wander through a smelly barnful of critters.

If you’re from Minnesota, you don’t have bragging rights unless you eat a few items helpfully provided on a stick. I suppose it started with corn dogs? Now one can partake of macaroni and cheese (deep-fried) on a stick. Pickles, twinkies, bacon, alligator – you name it!

I really did eat a deep-fried Twinkie the last year we went. (One of those bucket-list things you do only once.)

With fibro, a sun allergy and arthritis, walking the fair is way too much for me. I know I could wear more clothing to avoid the sun. (But it’s 90+ degrees with 90% humidity at the fair.) I could get one of those little go-carts, the ones that run anywhere, not just in bumper car tracks. (But I am not ready to go there yet!)

I lose sight of the dream of a small homestead every year the fair rolls around, and I make the decision (again) not to go. Never mind that the fair has thousands of people, miles of hot concrete, millions of stalls pumping out more heat as they deep-fry odd food items. (OK, I exaggerate the number of food stalls. Still.) My homestead won’t have those things. My chicken coop can be close to the house. I can get a dog trained up to herd the goats back home at night. Or, I can have a smaller pasture, littler goats. Or maybe, no goats. (Sigh.) I can get attachments for my ride-on lawn mower, to help with gardening. The list goes on … problems not yet unsolvable.

But I still felt like a failure, and so for solace, I cleaned my bathroom. With a stick. No, really. I remembered this great little tool I bought a few years back – a scrubby pad, triangular shaped, with an extend-o arm. It was intended to help reach into corners, and while it worked ok, somehow it fell out of use. Well, I’m pleased to report it works great for cleaning a bathtub!

I suspect the gentle readers with fibro or some similarly debilitating disease just had an a-ha moment. Cleaning the tub hurts. Hurts during, hurts after. I can’t bend or sustain even light activity without pain. But using my cleaner-on-a-stick for a slightly off-label purpose, I was able to complete a task with a lot less fibro cost.

Why am I so willing to make an adaptation to clean the tub, but not to go to the fair? Trial and error has proven to me that the fair will make me much too sick to be worth the effort. And being there, sickish, makes me feel inferior – even though I do believe if other people really understood the pain I’m in, and the energy it takes just to live, they wouldn’t judge me. But they don’t understand, and the stares and silent judgments pile on top of the pain and weariness which is all I feel by the time I get to the front gate.

I won’t know if our dream of homesteading is feasible until we try to work out more of the issues and questions as time goes by. But I remain hopeful – there are so many odd little ways to make life work these days, that I think two smart women should be able to put enough of them together and have a fantastic third act.