This week marks the beginning of Harmony Fair Anxiety Season, culminating this weekend in Harmony Fair Proper. Anxiety Season means band practice every night, in preparation for the boys' debut on Friday night as a rock band that can play more than two songs. It means fretting over Exhibit Hall supplies such as tacks, nails, picture wire, banquet roll, and paper plates and trying to perfect the forever-imperfect bookkeeping system for entries and prizewinners. It means taking repetitive phone calls from elderly men who don't trust the written word. The fair book may say, "Bring in your entries on Friday between 4 and 7 p.m.," but a surprising number of old vegetable farmers won't believe it till they hear it from me. 

Still, despite all the exhaustions and aggravations of Harmony Fair Anxiety Season, it's more relaxing this year on one front: finally, for the first time ever, the Exhibit Hall has a building. No more tents blowing over in the wind and scattering winter squash and baby sweaters everywhere. No more floods destroying cardboard 4-H exhibits about how to shear a sheep. No more teenage vandals stealing all the prize tomatoes and throwing them at the stage. This year we have a large, waterproof, windproof, lockable building.

So when I sit in my lawn chair for three days, discussing canning techniques and weirdly shaped vegetables with my townspeople, we will all marvel at the building and wonder how we muddled through our exhibit crises for so long. At the same time we will slightly mistrust the convenient niceness of our new venue. For, on the whole, people have been remarkably patient about the annual mishaps to their belongings. In fact the only people who have ever complained about damage are people from out of town. Harmony itself expects nothing less than awkwardness. This building may be too cushy for us after all.