By Kari Mar
La Conner Community News
The Saturday before the giant pumpkins are set to take over Christianson’s Nursery starts chilly but warms to 75 degrees under a clear blue sky: The magic formula for a perfect late-summer day in La Conner.
It is that brief September glimmer when summer hasn’t quite left and fall is already moving its furniture in.
The farmstands are still generous with tomatoes and corn, squash and dahlias. But somebody has spotted the first snow geese — skinny scouts, not nearly enough yet to turn the sky white, but enough to make people look north. On the boardwalk, a blue heron keeps watch over the Swinomish Channel. A harbor seal surfaces, disappears, then surfaces again.
And downtown, the witches arrive.
They wear pointy hats and carry brooms and dance in Gilkey Square. Lords and ladies in cobalt blue, gold embroidery and crushed velvet sweep past the brewery and the museum and tourists who had only meant to stop for lunch but lingered all afternoon.
Hark: It is Fables Faire.
It is also the Friends of Bigfoot Festival.
No proclamation from the crown is necessary. No council of elders is convened. The village of La Conner simply accepts that witches, woodland beasts, wandering minstrels and cryptids may all occupy the same Saturday.
Street vendors who weren’t here the day before and would leave by tomorrow hawk turkey legs, medieval trinkets and Bigfoot paintings. Artisans spread their work across tables. Children in plastic elf ears eat ice cream. Little Bigfoots run circles around big Bigfoots. Elves pose for pictures beside people in hiking boots and Seahawks shirts.
And Ol’ Blue, Thrives’ trolley, looking as though it has been circling La Conner since before anyone thought to keep track, makes the rounds with free rides from the turkey-leg vendor and trinket traders downtown to pool-noodle jousting practice at the marina.
A couple visiting from Oklahoma stops on First Street and takes it all in: the velvet, the antlers, the pointy hats.
They don’t have anything like this back home, they say.
That is probably true.
La Conner has spent a long time making room for people who see things a little differently — painters and writers, carvers and gardeners, potters and dreamers, and people perfectly willing to spend a Saturday carrying a broom or wearing a cape because it might be fun.
By evening, belly dancers swing fire and balance candelabras as the light fades over the channel.
And there is that unmistakable September-ness underneath all of it.
There won’t be many days like this left.
Next weekend, the giant pumpkins arrive at Christianson’s. Then the town begins another turn, away from overflowing fields and farmstands and toward the work coming out of studios, kitchens and workshops — the painters and potters, jewelers and weavers whose season seems to rise just as the harvest starts settling down.
But on Saturday, we got both.
Summer is still on our tongues in the last of the year’s blackberries. Fall is already moving through the sky on the wings of a few early snow geese.
And La Conner, given a little sunshine and an excuse, does what La Conner does best: puts on something beautiful and goes outside.
Kari Mar is the editor and publisher of La Conner Community News.
