Buttons (pictures will be added this evening)

With getting my life back on track I am also getting rid of useless things that are just funny. I went to an art show with Rick a long time ago and they had buttons (pin buttons not buttoning buttons) that say "Take Off Your Pants" so of course we ended up keeping a few of them. I still have one, even after all this time of purging I have somehow held onto this. So here it goes, out with everything else I have gotten rid of. And I find another button hiding underneath it. This one from the county fair. Sydney and I used to work the fair every year, taking entries, setting them on display, helping guard them during the weekend, and, of course, taking the displays down and getting the entries back to the people who brought them to the fair. Each year we met new and interesting people from the county. One year it would be the crazy lady who entered her flower display in the wrong category, didn't win anything, and demanded to know why, another year it was the kids who cried when we took their craft projects because it was their favorite one. But one person who stood out the most, was a lady who walked in with a brown paper bag full of buttons. Each button from a different event, and each with its own saying on it to inspire others. Setting up a display for this collection was one of the most difficult displays we had to work with, but one of the most fun. We laughed at the different sayings, chose which ones were the most entertaining and moved them toward the front, and put those pins everwhere we could find to place them on the board. When it was time to give the buttons back, the collector allowed us to choose our favorites to keep. I chose one about being excited (as you can see). The pure joy in just having a small part of a lifelong collection of fun sayings and happy feelings allowed Sydney and I to feel more like participants in the fair entry than when we were simply the workers in the background.

The people who enter collections and projects into the county fair have always interested me. As a child I would enter crafts and had no concept that these items were examined by groups of workers, and exclaimed over when they were good. As an adult, I saw the rapid decline in the number of entries, and the pure need for the community to participate in the fair. I still have yet to enter anything into a county fair since high school (and even then it was only one entry of jam that did not win), but I always think how much fun it would be to go see my collection, or my artwork displayed for all to see. The photographs are the most interesting part to me. Some people choose to take typical pictures, but many in my local community take artistic pictures of places we see every day. These are the ones that allow me to see a new beauty in my surroundings, and give me the opportunity to appreciate what is already there. While I'm minimizing my life, I will maximize my view of the world in this way (at least I hope).