A small town dilemma

This morning at breakfast we were having a discussion with our guests about Port Wing, small towns and what holds a small town like Port Wing together as a community.  It was informally decided that it might be all the community events that bring people together, whether it's the town baseball team at their weekend games, the museum's Harvest Festival dinner in October, the Fish Boil and the Lions Club Fall Festival coming up on Labor Day weekend, or any other event that asks people in town to donate a pan of bars, a salad or a few hours of their time.

In my last post I talked about being "too busy."  Besides running a B&B, we have a few other activities that keep us occupied.  The most recent event we helped with was the Port Wing Plein Air Painting Festival.  About twenty-eight artists came to Port Wing to paint area scenes outside--en plein air--and it culminates with a judging and then a public exhibit of all their entries in the Town Hall on Saturday afternoon.  Our contribution to this event was supplying the opening morning registration day with two pans of pecan caramel rolls, and setting up and managing the food table at the exhibit on Saturday.

Here are some photos of this year's Festival.  First, a few of the artists out painting...

And a few from the exhibit...some with ribbons!

So here's the dilemma.  Each of the major town events requires people--people to do the baking or cooking of all kinds and people to work MANY hours for events to come off successfully.  And in a small town, there aren't THAT many people.  And many of those people who have been volunteering and holding things together for many years aren't as young as they used to be!

Then you start thinking of alternatives.  Wouldn't it be just as easy to make a $20 donation to whatever group rather than making two pies, or a salad, or bars, or working all day at an event?  I know I've thought that many times for fundraisers my daughters did for school or Girl Scouts or...you name it!  Keep the Christmas wrap, magazines, candy bars, and let me just donate!  But in the case of events in small towns, just paying my way like that does nothing for community.  All of these events bring lots of other people into town and carry on some long-standing Port Wing traditions.

So, we'll gear ourselves up for these last big summer events.  The pickled beets are ready for the museum Harvest Dinner, we'll plan what pies we'll make for the church stand at the Fall Festival, and at the same time remember to hold on to and savor these last weeks of summer, 2015!

Waiting for the fog to lift

Too many warm days like this and there will be no possibility of ice caves this year!  Temps up in the lower 40s and we didn't even wear jackets.  And when we went down to The Lake, this was all we saw.  We're wondering when we will see the sun again!

Last night was the big Lutefisk & Meatball Dinner put on by the First Lutheran Church.  Lots of people came to get their annual infusion of lutefisk...and the rest just had meatballs!  I grew up eating lutefisk every Christmas Eve and I thought it all was delicious.  All the cooks and planners did a great job!

Last time I posted we were just bringing in our Christmas tree from the meadow.  We finally got it all decorated, even the ornament up at the very top.  That was acccomplished by Leann by standing probably too high up on the ladder and leaning in a little.  Next year we'll remember to put it on BEFORE we stand up the tree...and put water in the base.  This year we remembered to measure it while it was still outside and cutting off what needed to go BEFORE we brought it inside.  Learning can happen every day/year!

And finally, we finally got our trail cam put out and pointed at the deer feeder.  Leann made a post with a stabilizing base that we can move to a good position and it's easy to swap out the photo chips to download the pictures.   Mostly we've had bluejays during the day and deer at night.  These jays below are posing nicely.

And these are all in the middle of munching sunflower seeds by hammering them on the side of the box.

And this is our deer friend we've been calling "Mouse Ears" because they look like they've been frozen or damaged at some point in her life.  She's been coming here for a couple years now.

Someone recently suggested that deer might be attracted here by putting out some hay.  So I bought a bale of alfalfa from down here at Johnson's Store and it looks like he might be right.  Turns out he's the one that sold the bales to the store!  Marketing!

Then one night (by the digital time I see it was morning!) we had a group of three deer at the feeder.  They weren't posing very well though.

This one, however, got the memo about posing!

Shopping at the Port Wing Christmas Bazaar

The shopping place to be today was not at Target, Walmart or some other "box," but at the annual Christmas Bazaar at the Port Wing Town Hall.  Sponsored by the Monday Evening Club, the hall was full of arts and crafts vendors, bake sale tables from the First Lutheran Church and 4H, raffles for prizes, and lunch, of course.  My favorite stop is the wreath lady. We usually buy two, but I almost missed out this year.  Only one little wreath was left when I got there, and I was happy to give it a home!  

And...later this afternoon I learned that my name was called for the raffle and I won a nice spruce-scented candle.  The season has begun!  Don't forget the Lutheran Church lutefisk dinner on Saturday, December 13th.  Lutefisk, potatoes, cream sauce and/or melted butter (depending on whether your background is Swedish or Norwegian), lefse...and Swedish meatballs for the lutefisk-phobic!  I really like it but I also grew up having it every Christmas.

And speaking of lutefisk, during Older Daughter's phone call home on Thanksgiving, she asked if we could try making lutefisk while she and her husband are here during Christmas.  I again will attempt to channel my mother and other relatives who have passed on and see what we can turn out!

It was a pretty bleak scene down at The Lake this morning.  The sun tried to shine from time to time, but these pictures are pretty gray.  

 That larger speck out there is one of the commercial fishing boats coming.  It was much warmer today, so it was no problem standing on the pier watching it come in.

 Getting closer.

 And there's the Judy.

I'd probably regret it if it ever happened, but I'd love to go out on one of these boats and see what it's like out there "in the middle" of The Lake.  What could happen?

Harvest Dinner - "Reviving the Swedish Smorgasbord"

Today we celebrated the Swedish heritage of our town--Port Wing--with the annual Harvest Dinner, a fundraiser for our Heritage Museum.  Tonight after the clean-up, Soney Rockenbach, our museum curator, told us how the idea for this dinner began.  Back in the '30's a group of local women started a club called the Civic Club.  They met regularly and contributed to the life of the community with events and projects to promote the town.  One of those events was a Harvest Dinner which was designed to preserve the Swedish food traditions of the area families.  The club members all served the dinner wearing aprons and scarves of blue and yellow, and the hall was decorated with autumn colors.

That was then and due to time and age of the membership, the Civic Club is no longer operating.  But when Soney and her people started up our new museum back in 2001, they decided to revive the Harvest Dinner with the same menu, the same decorating scheme, and even the same apron style, and that's the event we celebrated today. 

Fortunately or unfortunately we had such a record crowd that I didn't get many pictures, and the ones I did get are blurry.  But it was a big success--Swedish potato sausage (Potatiskorv), turkey and dressing, ham, pickled herring (Inlagd sill), Swedish meatballs (Svenska köttbullar), rice pudding, pickled beets, lots of salads and desserts.  All delicious!

The next big dinner is the First Lutheran Church Lutefisk Supper on the second Saturday in December.  Lutefisk, lefse and Swedish meatballs.  Get it on your calendar now!

Everyone here for the concert!

So glad to have Leann home for the weekend.  She spent all last week at Mayo with her sister, Kristi, who started her first of 5 1/2 weeks of radiation treatments.  But they both came home here yesterday and were joined by Leann's other sister, Sandy and their Mom today.  And they all came to go to the Sara Thomsen concert tonight at our friends' gallery in town, the Hoth Lee Art Gallery.

It was such a nice concert, lots of our friends and others who enjoy Sara's music.  And intermission with yummy snacks and a glass of wine!  Thanks, Sandy & Nancy for hosting another great concert.

And before concert time we got a few jobs taken care of.  Sandy got the task of getting the new "Public Beach/Pier" sign ready to hook onto the rest of the arrow signs.  Leann painted the sign and we just needed the eyes screwed into the top to connect to the hooks on the sign above.  Whew!  Got that done and it's still summer...almost...

At the concert tonight we heard that a mother bear and three babies were seen crossing our field in front of our house.  But we missed it!  We did, however, come home to this cutie on our driveway tonight.  We don't know what kind of snake it is, but it's pretty little...as you can see.  Maybe all snakes move in kind of a side-winder manner, but this one did and it was kind of creepy...

Brats, bands and blue ribbons!

Well, this is it!  The BIG Labor Day weekend in Port Wing, Wisconsin.  On Saturday we had the 56th Annual Fish Boil put on all these years by the Port Wing Baseball Club.  And on Sunday--today--we had the 63rd Annual South Shore Lions Club Fall Festival put on, of course, by the Lions Club.

Here's a scene from the Fish Boil--5 or 6 big iron pots in which they cook the trout or white fish, potatoes, whole onions and spices.   They drizzle melted butter over all of that on your plate, and add coleslaw and rye bread.  It's pretty yummy, I think, but sometimes waiting in the line to get the tickets to get in makes it easy to bypass it for another year...and that's what we did yesterday.  See the line below.  I know, no stamina!

But today was the Fall Festival and not-so-daunting lines.  The Lions sell brats, hotdogs, and corn, and the fire department sells hamburgers and pop.  And then there's beer on the side, of course.  And First Lutheran Church sells pieces of pie with ice cream!  We brought blueberry and pecan pies.

Somehow we are able to get the University of Minnesota-Duluth (UMD) marching band to come to our celebration to add to the fun.  They did a short performance right outside the Town Hall and then marched in the parade later.  One of our high school 2014 graduates was supposed to be playing with them today but for some reason the freshman weren't with the group today.

The parade begins at 2pm and we always have good seats right in front of Hoth-Lee Gallery.  It takes a while to get everyone lined up so below is the American Legion color guard waiting for the high sign to begin.

Here is a car full of four of our long-time residents of Port Wing.  Notice the nicknames.  It seems like just about every male over the age of 40 has a nickname, probably given to them from something they did in their younger days.  Sometimes if you need to know someone's real first name, other people really have to think about it because the nicknames are so a part of them.

Then come the Port Wing fire engines and emergency vehicles--today there were about five of them.  Every entry throws candy, even to old parade-watchers like us!

This vehicle was purchased using funds gathered from the raffle tickets sold at the Fish Boil and other fundraisers.  (We won $10 in the raffle, by the way, and a cooler!)  This vehicle is used to fight fires and respond to emergencies up in the woods and out in the boonies where trucks sometimes can't go.  Always happy to support the fire fighters and EMTs!  And may they NOT ever have to come to see us!

UMD Marching Bulldogs again.  Don't you love bands?

Along with the Port Wing FD, we also get to see emergency vehicles from the other area towns--Iron River, Herbster and Cornucopia--two or three from each town!  You just hope nothing bad happens in the time it takes for the parade to pass by!

 And did I mention Blue Ribbons?  Another event on Fall Festival day is the Garden Club Flower Show.  Leann tried some entries this year and we even got some winners.   This flower arrangement below earned a 3rd place or white ribbon.

 Those are tiny Tansy flowers in a tiny coffee pot and the pink ones are some other little weed in the tiny cups.  This, of course, is the Miniature category and she got another 3rd place.

And as an afterthought, we entered our little cactus in the Succulent category and it earned a Blue Ribbon!  The original stem fell off of our 3-foot-tall cactus, so I stuck it in some water and it rooted.  And now it's become a prize winner!

And finally, this was the entry from the Museum and Historical Society, and this will be the next big event that I'll be writing about.  Smorgasbord--Swedish meatballs, ham, turkey, potatoes, gravy, all kinds of salads and desserts.  Saturday, October 11 - Y'all come!

And tomorrow is September?  Not possible!

A short visit to the Bayfield County Fair

We didn't have enough to do last weekend, so we zipped on over to Iron River to see what the Bayfield County Fair was all about.  Several of our friends had entered artwork, or produce or other items to be judged, but this time we just wanted to see what it was all about.

The last time I went to this fair was the summer of 1983.  Older Daughter was 2 at the time, and we all went with Grandpa and Grandma Larson to the fair.  Of course, there was a merry-go-round, and I thought Sara needed a ride on the merry-go-round.  We got the ticket, I lifted her onto the horse and was going to hold her on the horse during the ride.  Then the merry-go-round started.  I had FORGOTTEN that the horse--and the rider/Sara--would be going up and down, up and down, all during the ride.  Well, the ups were very up, and I'm not very tall, and I had all I could do to hang on to Sara for the duration of this ride.  I was never so glad to have a carnival ride stop!

Fast forward 31 years, and I'm back at the county fair.  Here are some pictures:

Cute little calf .

Giant beef cattle chillin' - I think that fuzzy tannish one is a Gallaway.

Of course, this was my favorite building - the chickens and roosters.  I don't think there were any two alike.  And all presenting with attitude!

Also in the poultry building were the rabbits. Rabbits are always a part of county (and state) fair exhibits, but I really don't know what purpose rabbits serve on a farm besides being cute.  Am I missing something here?  MB from IL - what do you know on this topic?

And then there's the midway, but we didn't spend much time there.  We found out later that the $12 fee to getting into the fair paid for unlimited times on all the rides.  And really...not many rides!

So, we went, we now know what it's all about, not sure if we'll go back.  But maybe we'll decide to join with our friends and enter our produce into the various categories judged at the fair.  I think the peapods that we picked today might earn us a Blue Ribbon!