Classic
Flare, Local Wares and that Summer-y,
Late Autumn Air
Anyone who’s been in Albany, Georgia
for the Holiday Season knows that, if you’re dreaming of a white Christmas in
South Georgia, you’re more than likely to wake up from that dream into a bright
day, flush with unabashed sunshine and drawing along under near-eighty degree
temperatures. And if you’re me, you
don’t mind. Me and Hot Days are friends,
and although autumn is my favorite time of year, I’m perfectly fine if Summer
decides to take its sweet time packing its bags, hanging around nigh unto the
winter months, if it pleases, which was exactly what seemed to have happened,
in the final months of 2021. No
complaints from me, as it made for a balmy, comfortable Sunday for DAP Tales
and I to visit the Classic Car Show and Arts & Crafts Fair, at the Exchange
Club Fairgrounds, in Albany.
The fairgrounds, essentially a spacious lot in Southwest Albany with some low-lying buildings, loitered under a broad sky of pale blue and streaked with the wispy clouds of early December. We found a parking space within the expanse of tawny, season-withered grass, bought our wrist bands from three older fellas in their trademark orange Exchange Club vests in a small, windowed tickets booth and proceeded into the main building, where most of the action was.
The space was neither large nor small, and was neither crowded nor sparse, but housed a fair array of local vendors, their tents or tables brightly displaying their wares. Strangely, the very first table seen as we walked through the door into the space, was what looked to be an almost random assortment of rustic farming tools and machine parts, mostly corroded and seemingly unrelated.
I didn’t see any
signs or labels on the bins and no one was there for me to ask what it was. I chalked it up to being an Albany thing and
kept it moving. Beside the unlabeled
agrarian history exhibit was a lovely family positioned at a table labeled as
the Simply Beautiful Candle Company, featuring an attractive collection of
scented candles and other bath-and-bed sundries. Their candles are hand-crafted and we bought
one scented in my favorite, frankincense & myrrh, because DAP Tales said it
smelled like me. It did. Also, it smelled lovely later, when lit in
our room.
Across from Simply Beautiful was
McDonald’s Farm (don’t sing it!), whose eye catching honey colored tent
sheltered a table laden with many varieties of their locally farmed pure
honey. Though I do like honey, I’m
nothing of a connoisseur; I’ve always thought that the taste of honey is what
honey tastes like. But having a chance
to sample pure, unrefined honeys made by bees with access to specific floral
sources was truly eye opening. The
flavors were dramatically different, ranging from the sharp and almost pungent,
to the robustly sweet, to the mild and mellow.
Thanks, Monte! It was a pleasure
to speak with you and to taste what your bees have been up to.
We meandered at ease, speaking with
the vendors. Most of their offerings are
made by hand, with materials from local sources: jewelry, clothing, baked goods
and fudge, flags of assembled stained wood.
Photographer Robin Bushnell offers her view, timelessly recorded, of
nearby places and the people and things there.
I loved her image of a moored boat, captured awash in that day’s passing
evening light. Check out her website to view some of those wonderful pics.
Close to the second door of the
building was Martha Jane’s Jams & Jellies, a broad spread with rim-to-rim
jars of pretty much every kind of jam or jelly you could be looking to put on
some toast or whatever you like to put your jams and jellies on. Strawberry, blackberry, probably any berry
you can pick in Georgia; peach, jalapeno; I think there was a yellow root
jelly, even. I picked up a tasty pepper
sauce from her that I put in my greens; it’s nice.
That was the first half of the floor space. The second was occupied by ranks of classic cars, their domed cabins and chrome-trimmed grills glittering in the floodlights from overhead. Chevelle Super Sports and Mustangs sat silently, posed for inspection wearing their red, black, white or silver candy coated paint jobs. Chrome accents, polished like mirrors, reflected us like a fun house as we walked past. Spotless interiors boasted curvaceous, stitched leather.
Right in the center aisle, was a grass-green Mustang fastback, almost exactly like the one my parents had when I was five or six years old, except ours hadn’t been a convertible.
I think
my favorite of the bunch, though, was the Rolls Royce, with its solid
vulcanized rubber tires on spoked wheels under sweeping, flanged fenders and
its canister headlamps. It looked like
something straight out of The Great Gatsby, and its panache and classiness
hadn’t been diminished, not even slightly, by its many decades. To the back of the exhibit hall, a
car-exhibitor, preparing to leave, fired up his 50’s era Chevy convertible and
just for a moment, the whole place, from sheet metal wall to sheet metal wall,
shook with a thunderous roar and a persistent rumbling, like a great beast
rising from a century of slumber. “Yep,
it runs,” a show attendee who had been speaking with the exhibitor beforehand
said, grinning, as eager motor-heads ran over to grab a video with their phones
or just smile.
Peters Performance, 408 Sands Dr, Albany, GA 31705
The only thing out in the actual fairgrounds we spent time to see was when DAPTales took a moment to sit down with Santa, who was in the place, taking photos. He seemed jovial, but I wasn’t sure how well Albany’s summery Christmas weather was treating him, in that fluffy red suit. Well, he can have his North Pole climate; a li’l Yuletide sweat never hurt anybody.
al-Falaq
is a writer and illustrator living in Atlanta, Georgia. He loves cats and
shares his home with an ornery fur ball with nine tales, at least! His collection of poetry and short stories,
Threadbare is available on Amazon.
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