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We had to wedge in our State Fair trip this year, like a steaming pile of yellow cheese curds crammed into every corner of a paper basket that threatened to collapse at any moment. That’s how full life felt this summer: two kids, six or so jobs between us adults, aging parents, a short stint at Children’s Hospital, 48 hours without electricity and an air conditioner on its last legs in the 70-some-year-old home we’d purchased seven years ago.
We’d spent the previous 48 hours standing vigil at a family member’s side a few states away, just five months after a shocking cancer diagnosis. His cancer “journey” felt more like riding a roller coaster — a slow and steady climb filled with confusing new medical jargon, an intense surgery, aborted treatments and then a sudden free fall screaming down the hill. We would’ve stayed longer, but life and jobs called us back to Minnesota for the last week of summer before the start of school.
Monday at 4 p.m. was the only chance we had to go to the fair, so we headed out there despite heat advisories and warnings of yet another brutal thunderstorm. When we walked past the entrance, we remembered pausing there last year for a photo with our loved one who is now tormented by cancer. It had been his first time to the fair and, as the only native Minnesotans among the adults in our group, I remembered how proud I was that day that everyone was having such a good time. Our family had been no stranger to tragedy and discord the previous few years, but who couldn’t bond over Sweet Martha’s chocolate chip cookies?
A few short hours later, we were watching chicks peck their way out of fertilized eggs, damp with sweat, when the warnings came that everyone needed to seek shelter. Fresh off watching the movie “Twister,” we dashed across the road to the horticulture building where people milled around drinking craft beer and staring at the deluge outside, our bodies covered with the brown, sticky dirt that was lofted into the air during the wind gusts that preceded the thunderstorm.
“At least we made a memory,” I told the kids on the bus back to the church lot, their rubber clogs soaked with mud.
As the sky turned a deep orangey red and two rainbows stretched across the horizon, it seemed like maybe that’s where it would end this year, beauty alongside the tragedy of no butter princesses or raspberry malts. But I had a ticket to attend again the next day for a newspaper event, and my youngest son said he’d join in exchange for a promise to try his hand at the basketball game at the Midway.