Kentucky Wool Festival

Last weekend was the Kentucky Wool Festival, which takes place just outside of Falmouth at the fairgrounds by Kincaid Lake State Park. I have a certain prejudice against the Wool Fest, because they have the same vendors year after year and no one new can get a foot in the door except by shear (hahaha) dumb luck, but we go each year nonetheless. Why pass up an opportunity to eat funnel cakes and gyros and pay one dollar for a 12 ounce can of soda?

There's always a sheep shearing demonstration, a herd-dog demonstration, farm animals you can pet (although this is not recommended with the prize turkey who walks around puffed up and menacing all weekend and and goes home at the end of it to have a stroke), tractors you can pet, a two-stroke engine-powered corn meal grinder, a sorghum booth, a "wool" tent, homemade lye soap, a blacksmith... Any festivalish thing you can think of, except for a midway, it has. But this year's noteworthy experience was the butterfly vendor.

The butterfly vendor had all kinds and colors of butterflies in glass shadowbox frames, just as you might expect. They had single butterflies pinned behind glass, and herds or flocks pinned up together, and even bugs that, if I saw them on my wall, I would be tempted to try to kill with a baseball bat. But the thing I liked the most, and yet found myself the most disturbed by, were the earrings. Cut, laminated, and hung from french hooks were the wings of butterflies of every possible color.

As compelling as the colors were, and as unique as the concept seemed, I couldn't get past the idea that something as fragile and "innocent" as a butterfly had to die to make these. Of course, as my venerable mother pointed out, there is nothing innocent about a cabbage butterfly-- the little yellow ones that are everywhere eating the leaves of things you'd rather not have them eat-- so I consolled myself that the same must be true of other butterflies in their native habitats. Maybe, like fallen angels, butterflies are things of beauty that are evil to the core! So I wear my massacred butterfly earrings with pride. Long live the Wool Festival!