Loose Leaf Notes

The following is a short essay written about last year’s FloydFest, which was printed in the FloydFest program this year.

 
FloydFest, our town’s yearly world music festival, is a people watchers paradise. My favorite part of the weekend festival – just six miles from my driveway on The Blue Ridge Parkway – is the cross section of people who attend it. Once on the sprawling grounds of open fields and wooded pathways, roles and differences tend to fall away, as people of all walks of life and ages speak the same language of “fun.”

 
FloydFest delivers what you’d expect from a premier music festival – great music, good food, creative arts and crafts, and a variety of children’s activities, but it has some special touches that you might not find anywhere else, like the lily pond landscaped with flowers, portable hand washing stations, a rock climbing wall, and a cyber café hosted by Floyd’s own Blue Nova. The timber wrights who built the impressive timber-framed main stage, roast a pig at their campsite each year. Sweetwater Bakery bakes bread onsite in their hand built brick oven.

 
While I enjoy intermingling with the mix of interesting people who attend Floyd Fest each year, I especially look forward to being re-united with Floyd friends, young and old, who, because of distance or the hectic pace of life, I don’t see nearly enough. This year, I kicked up some dust in the beer garden, dancing to the music of William Walter with Suzanne. I hadn’t seen my old Grateful Dead dancing companion, who lives in Arlington now, since last year’s Floyd Fest.

 
Last year, when I read poetry on the soapbox stage under the FloydFest Poetree, I remember looking out and seeing Volker’s smiling face in the audience. Grown-up now and living in California, he was in town for Floyd Fest and made a point to come by and hear my reading. Volker was back again this year, this time with his sister Johanna, a past Floyd High School Salutatorian who went to the prom with my son, Josh, and loves the Red Sox nearly as much as he does.

 
Asa’s baby girl has gotten big. She was taking in the festival sights from the carrier on her daddy’s back. I snapped a picture of Joel holding his nearly year old daughter while her mother, unaware, danced to Donna the Buffalo.

 
Lyn Willow and I pulled up some grass and had lunch together when our paths crossed and we both discovered we were hungry. “We couldn’t have pulled this off if we planned it,” I told her, laughing.

 
Sitting in the shade of the Healing Arts tent catching up with Jeff, founder of the Blue Ridge School of Massage, I saw my friend Mara’s daughter rush past. “Kyla, did you put on some sunscreen?” I shouted out. She was on her way to march in the Children’s Parade.

 
It’s been estimated that over 10,000 would attend FloydFest this year, and from the look of the crowds, it may have been more. And yet, FloydFest feels like a small world, where town officials, artists, farmers, and business owners converge as families to share the beauty and music of our area and to welcome newcomers and new music into it.

 
A homegrown homecoming, a cross pollination of the best in music and people, by the hands of the many, mostly volunteers, who guide it; FloydFest feels like home, because it is.

Post Notes: See the photos that go with this post HERE. Scroll down for more Floyd Fest fun.