Status Update: Another Friday Market

I'd been thinking "At least I can use this cheapie laptop in Friday Market. At least, because it was such an annoying piece of garbage that its previous owners never got much use out of it, it still has a juicy new battery that will run for four hours."

Hello? The edge of the storm was expected to have moved on by now. Edges of storms have a way of lingering here, though. It was far too humid to take a laptop out of an air-conditioned basement.

I had thought of making a blog post out of the Friday Market experience. Did any winners from the antique car show drive through? (Not that I saw.)

Did people cover their faces and maintain healthy social distance? Most did.

A man who's been told that he had coronavirus but wasn't ill enough to get treatment, then that some veterans (he is one) were wrongly told they had it when they didn't, then that he might have it or get it again, was in the market, looking frazzled, staying inside his truck and shouting to people from whom he bought things to throw his purchases in the back.

A woman who left a child in a minivan while she shopped and haggled shouted to the child not to shout out of the window, as the child could see adults doing.

One woman with lovely long thick white hair came up to me with her bare face sticking out, defensively explaining to people who weren't asking, "My COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disorders, the catchall word for asthma, bronchitis, etc.) is so bad I can't wear a mask." Right. The panic is about a chest cold that kills older people who have COPD, so she's out in a crowd...

During the past week I've read of crowds turning ugly on people like her. I don't like that. She is the one in danger. She is the one who was likely to die from some other "natural cause" this winter anyway, and is likely to go out like a light the minute the coronavirus hits her. Why would anyone want to make her more miserable than she is? I was praying for her.

Weather? The 90-percent humidity was worse than the 70-degree (Fahrenheit) heat for the first hour or so. Gate City was swaddled in one of those "fogs" that are actually low-flying clouds, where you can feel only a few of the actual raindrops because you're filmed with steam already. Fogs and clouds are the same thing at different altitudes. Our altitude is high enough that we spend quite a lot of time in these clouds, but we have to go to higher ground to get a chance to stand in the sunshine above one and watch it rain or snow on the valley below us. People set up their displays, and most people did their shopping, in this cloud before full daylight to beat the heat.

By about 9 a.m. the sun was starting to beat down. The temperature was recorded as 99 in the shade. In the Friday Market any shade is provided by vendors. By about 1 p.m. I started to feel too parched to talk to any remaining shoppers, so though I don't like to take down my display while anybody is still shopping, I went inside. I did not see any reactions to the heat and humidity more serious than (a) a lot of people repeating that it was hot, and (b) a church group bringing in an enormous cooler and offering people cold bottled water.

Fashion notes? I saw just one veil, very pretty and decorative though not matching the woman's clothes. Masks ruled. The coolest design I saw all day was worn by a young man. It was brown and yellow sunflowers on a forest-green background, and really blended in with the camouflage-colored shorts and shirt he was wearing.

One of the worst matches between mask and clothing colors was mine. Bright pastel and white mask, soft rose and cream dress...I figured it would soon be too hot to care that I have a knitted cowl that matches the dress, which the cotton mask did not. So it was.

I saw three separate shoppers wearing skirts that didn't cover their knees as they walked. Two of them were wearing tunic-type, semi-fitted, short-skirted dresses over shorts. Survey says, if you forget and bend over while wearing that style, you may be decently covered, but the shorts still "read" visually as underwear and you still look more ridiculous than someone wearing a shirt over shorts, even though the shirt and shorts expose more thigh than the tunic and shorts do. (This "survey" consisted of people's reactions, as in out-loud laughter, when one of the fashion victims bent over to load purchases into the back of a car.) Mainly I noticed how much shorter and fatter all three of those women looked than they would have looked in regular shirts and skirts (the kind of skirts that cover the curve of the leg and swish when you walk). They all had decent "matronly" figures and they all looked fat.

Meanwhile the family who dress like Mennonites, though some smaller churches have similar dress codes, were baking their bread snacks in their snack wagon, the women's skirts every bit as long as the man's trousers. A long skirt does not feel hotter than a short skirt in summer, although it does feel warmer than a short skirt in winter. A long skirt can be used to fan cool air around you on a hot day. A long skirt also keeps off the deer flies that had invaded the market, possibly because people have sprayed stuff that killed their natural predators. Everybody was perspiring, however bare or covered, but my guess would be that the people whose skins were burning while being bitten by deer flies were a lot less comfortable than the ones perspiring into roomy cotton clothes.

I mention this because one shirtless sufferer asked how we could stand to wear ankle-length dresses in the heat. The answer is: very easily. How anyone can stand to bare their skin to deer flies is what I don't understand.

It was a pretty good market day, on the whole. I last worked an open-air market in temperatures above 100 about 25 years ago; I felt less bothered by the heat than I remember feeling then. I felt parched and tired at the end of the day, but not nearly as bad as I've felt after milder days when somebody's sprayed poison near the market.