Spoutwood Fairy Festival 2012
More photos (including tribe kids and adults being adorable) from this year and last via flickr tags here
Between work schedules, other weekend plans, and feeling physically unwell, many of our usual contingent almost didn't make it to Spoutwood Farm's May Day Fairy Festival for the first time in four years. Spoutwood's Fairy Festival is a wholesome family-friendly, freak-friendly, eco-friendly event held each Beltane weekend by the owners of an organic CSA veggie farm on the southern edge of Pennsylvania. There are drum circles and hippie bands and face painting and musical and circus-trick performers and pony rides and storytelling and many SCA/renfaire vendors... and unique garden herb vendors and real healthy food vendors and compostable everything and less litter than I see at Burning Man events and dogs and cats and parrots and ferrets and a forest maze to get lost in and speakers from Tolkien scholars to John Michael Greer and a pack of Green Men who are local artists blessing the owners' fields and blessing the folks who make a living on this festival circuit.
And costumes. I would go every year just to traipse about in my alternate-worlds archetypal me-outfits and take photos of the lovely folks who go all out with their costumes. Just as I would go every year to bring even one of our Tribe children along. This year, I had some technical difficulties with my main camera, namely that a fall it took months back seems to have damaged the focusing abilities of one of my lenses. (Annoyingly, but not coincidentally since I take it everywhere, my favourite.) I have very few shots, but I do have some to remember the day by, and that's enough.