Friday night I headed out of town to visit the Tri-State Mennonite Relief Sale. For those of you who don’t know what relief sales are, here. For the rest of you, no explanation needed.
I was going to be very bloggy and do some live posting but it turns out that was not so feasible. This may come as a surprise to some but the Garret County Fairgrounds in Maryland do not have wireless. It’s shocking, I know. Ah, if only I possessed an iPhone and Twitter account, you could have had minute-by-minute updates of all the auction action.
The Tri-State Relief Sale is pretty small and I don’t really know anyone there. Which is fine because then I got to concentrate on the really important stuff: eating and buying. Bless the Mennonites for figuring out a way to eat a lot of food in the name of stopping global hunger.
East Coast relief sales that I have been to are different than the one I very regularly attended as a child and teenager in Iowa (maybe it’s a Midwest thing?). In Iowa, it was the Mennonite gathering of the year. All the Mennonites (and the Amish and the Conservatives) gathered together for those two days. There was nothing else quite so inclusive. The Mennonite high school graduation was maybe the next closest thing but there were lots of Mennonites that didn’t go there and the Conservatives had their own school and the Amish didn’t go to high school at all. So the MCC sale was where we gathered, one big dysfunctional varied family, the whole spectrum of us.
It was our Pride Parade. And it was great.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Ryan Egli // Jul 22, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Yep, I grew going to the IL relief sale and it was the same thing. Major event for the year for the whole family of Mennonite types. My job was always helping out at the all you can eat pancake breakfast. Nothing like syrup in beards to get the day started off right.
2 Bob // Jul 23, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Mmmm… relief sales. I think it’s about the only time I eat vrenike these days. Greetings from KS.
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