The Big Jump and a big party.

October 29, Ardmore.

The Big Jump, miles of country roads and highway heading straight south back into the warmth and almost home. We made it before 2 PM, no fuss and no hum, the way it seldom is traveling with small children. They slept til Oklahoma City, 220 miles strong, and were quiet as shadows the rest of the way without even having left their seat once. Sara wasn't so lucky and arrived a while after us, she had to stop repeatedly to accommodate a fussy Gigi.
For me it was a day stretched to the brim, no rest and all work, after the road came the much taunted Kelly Miller Circus Halloween Party, and going shopping for it after cooking a late lunch, getting the kids ready in lightning time and the headache that started in the morning when I drove on for hours without eating (no stopping til the kids wake up is the golden rule of kid-totting circus traveling) growing worse, and the fatigue setting in with a vengeance, the party went on in the trailer with Sheyla and her family who'd come up from Dallas but I crashed, I couldn't go on anymore.
Nicolas got second place in the Halloween kid costume contest and I take full credit for that as Fridman left me to my devices to go rehearse his Black Angels skit with Julio, Jeremy and Johnnie. I put him in a Goodwill-bought clown jumper, dug out his biggest shoes and asked Deya to paint red dots on his face. Dylan I dressed like Johnny Depp's Cry Baby with a black leather jacket, white shirt and red Converse shoes, slicked-back hair and an eyeliner tear on one of his cheeks.
I think they both looked drop-dead gorgeous, what else.

A trailer with a view.

October 29, Ardmore, Oklahoma (329 miles, Hardy Murphy Coliseum.)

The circus.

October 28, Eureka.

A trailer with a view.

October 28, Eureka, Kansas (32 miles, fairgrounds.)

Colder.

October 27, Yates Center.

So cold, so windy and cold, the trapeze was canceled for the second show. The elephants suffered too for the lot was rocky and it hurts their feet; they moved as if in slow motion.

Junkyard next to the circus lot.

A trailer with a view.

October 27, Yates Center, Kansas (22 miles, fairgrounds.)

Cold.

October 26, Burlington.

It's so cold at night, the circus generator is on til morning. This is when a motor home is needed, so we don't have to take the children out into the cold to the truck.

Downtown building.

A trailer with a view.

October 26, Burlington, Kansas (36 miles, Kelley park.)

Brett.

October 25, Garnett.

A trailer with a view.

October 25, Garnett, Kansas (78 miles, North Lake Garnett park.)

Main street.

October 23, Harveyville.

Rose.

October 23, Harveyville.

Lawyer.

October 23, Harveyville.

Bird bath.

October 23, Harveyville.

Two days here and I forgot to take a Trailer with a View picture, comatose from the cold or too busy visiting the pottery studio. It would have shown Sara's and Eddie and Vickie's trucks from the front.
Here are a few of the views from the village instead, before I went into Jepson Studio.
I spent all my Christmas allowance but I am richer.

Dead center.

October 23, Harveyville.

It was cold, the kids were sleeping, it was a perfect time to go for a walk. The place is hardly a hamlet, not big enough to have a stoplight or even an intersection, but it is big enough to have a pottery studio with the whole world in its shapes and glazes, the desert's hues, the ocean's blue, the starless night's infinite black, the sand dunes and the waves, they're all in the stoneware that owner Barry Jepson, with Linda, Julie and Robin make here in what at first sight appeared to be the forsaken end of the road.
"You're in the center of the United States here," said Linda, who is from Florida and followed her husband here from Seattle. They bought a three-bedroom ranch house and 13 acres for just over $40,000 two years ago, which could be another reason why the end of the road in Kansas is more attractive than it first seems.
And just down highway 31, Burlingame, a little bigger than Harveyville, just like so many other downtrodden corners of the country is a study in what America has left behind, with its cobblestone main street, handwritten shop signs, the haphazard quality of the buildings and stores, anything but pretty, flat tones, simple trades, a tire shop, a meat market, the Bug Guys and the Sante Fe Café, all neon lit and nowhere to go, haphazard, unadorned, authentic, but also anachronistic, as if someone had stopped the clock in the fifties and thrown away the key, before the chain stores, gentrification and manufactured tastes made the country look tiredly cute and the same from one end to the other.
But then the town is most probably dying, slowly oozing its population like rural communities the country over.

News junkie.

October 23, Harveyville.

I'm craving my NPR news fix today.
Every time I turned on the radio they were asking me for money.

Jump.

October 23, Harveyville, Kansas (111 miles, a baseball field.)

After a stop on the parking lot of the Gardner Walmart (everybody went shopping,) we jumped to Friday's location as the fairgrounds in Gardner were not an option with the rain we've had. We're all stuck here too but at least we'll have something to eat. No shows today then, and it's just as well as it's barely in the 40s, an unexpected day off to be savored intimately.
Those are difficult days for Jim, the manager, every day bringing a new challenge, tomorrow yet more uncertain than usual. Nothing is ever assured in the circus, improvisation and creativity are always a must, and endurance and a can-do attitude required skills, but the muddy days are even harder.
There are two weeks left before the end of the season.

A maize.

October 22, Leavenworth.

It's the maize, stupid.
Sheyla puts Maizena, or corn starch, on her son's diaper rashes and it works wonders. How come I haven't heard about this in two years I don't know, but exit diaper rash ointments brought all the way from France, an expensive option to say the least, adios talc made of who-knows what chemical substance, and enter maize from the corner market, all-natural and a dollar fifty a box, and it goes in the soup too (just not from the same box hopefully.)
Related chemical news: last month I realized that the wipes I was using contained multi versions of paraben, a chemical used in everything from cosmetics to food whose safety has increasingly come under scrutiny. I had started avoiding it long ago, preferring all-natural baby lotions and sunscreens but somehow didn't think of checking the most obvious, the most ubiquitous - the wipes. The ones I buy now have organic cotton and no parabens, and they're cheap, too, and that's important for this circus family.
Corn and cotton, my abCs.

More rain.

October 22, Leavenworth.

After yesterday's storms more of the same today leading to parking delays upon arriving onto the lot. We opted for staying far from the backstage but safe and dry on pavement. Not so lucky the crew who has to raise the tent under the rain and in the cold.

A trailer with a view.

October 22, Leavenworth, Kansas (69 miles, 300 South 20th Street.)