I’m on a deadline. I should be working, working, working. I’ve got less than two weeks until my first craft fair, my first sales venue since Katrina, and I think I don’t have enough inventory or at least not enough variety of inventory or, oh damn, I don’t know what I don’t know.
I haven’t really done a craft fair before. I’ve sold pieces here and there. I’ve had one house jewelry sale party. That’s really it. I was gearing up for my first craft fair in September of 2005, but then the hurricane hit and ate my inventory - and my supplies - and my tools - and everything else I owned. Eight feet of water in the house and I lost hundreds of items ready for sale, necklaces all tagged and priced, earrings packaged on hand-made personal logo-displaying cards, display racks I made myself out of all manner of cute and clever recycled materials.
I had been rather excited about my first real fair, a little proud of the things I’d made and a little silly thinking I might make back the investment I’d made in materials. Unless I sold a portion of what I’d made, well, all those silly glittery things I’d enjoyed making were just a really expensive hobby.
It kinda killed me, going back into the house after the storm, digging through everything and dragging 99.9% of my previous life out to the curb to be disappeared into the landfill with everyone else’s destroyed pasts. Looking around my study, I could imagine the water coming in. Everything in the room was pretty much where I had left it. The water must have seeped in, not in great torrents that would have knocked things about, but in more gradual incursions, rivulets and streams finding their ways in through walls themselves and electrical sockets, under doors and through old drafty windows, eventually through the waist-high mailslot - a hundred, a thousand small incursions, water seeking its level from outside to in.
Most of the furniture in that room - the heavy baker’s rack, the bookcase I’d made myself, the adorable 6X6 cubbyhole storage unit I’d drooled over and finally overpaid for because I just had to have it - stood just where it had been, the non-buoyant contents still where they were weeks before. The buoyant stuff, the stuff that naturally floats like wooden items and air-filled glass spheres (a strange collection of mine), and all those things too light to withstand the currents and eddies, all those items had gone where they were taken and fallen where they were when the household tide went out, probably much much more slowly than it had come in.
The desk in the middle of the room was the place I had worked and crafted. It was a huge cheap thing, the best I could afford at the time, made of composite board, compressed chips glued together. It looked as if it had partially melted. The water had gotten under the faux wood laminate and destroyed the glue until the whole thing simply sagged and collapsed to be covered, as everything in the entire house was covered, with layers of plastered papers and no-longer buoyant items now abandoned by the inhouse sea and left beached wherever they were when the waters receded. On top it all, on every surface, floor, wall, and ceiling, were the spider web colonies of exotic molds unknown to any environment save the aftermath of disasters.
Hanging on the walls, on metal grids I’d cleverly hung from the dropped molding circling the room a foot below the ceiling, were the necklaces, formerly glittery creations that were the product of hundreds of dollars in materials and hundreds hours of patient, quiet handiwork - all mildewed and mired and, sigh…
So, I rather lost my enthusiasm for craft fairs for a while. Ten years later it is now and I am just getting ready for my first real foray into amateur retail.
And I really shouldn’t be here now. I’ve got way too much work to do.
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