Vidya Buys A House

Early in the day on Gaura Paurnima Vidya and I went on a trip up the Ohio River to the tip of West Virginia and beyond to Columbiana, Ohio to pick out a booth for her at the Shaker Woods Festival. It is held in a private woods on a farm, so the vendors build permanent structures that they leave there from one year to the next.

When you get into the show, you have to approach the previous vendor to make arrangements to purchase the booth on the spot you get. The booths are like little houses. As we were one of the first new vendors to be given the tour of available spaces we had the choice of several locations but ended up getting one next to all the picnic tables behind the food court, which we assume will get us a second look from visitors to the show. Plus it’s next to the food court. :-)

We called the previous owner and made a deal for the booth that we could live with and then confirmed our choice with the show management and got it all finished before going to the temple for moonrise Gaura Paurnima.

I have heard it is good to start projects on Gaura Paurnima. I don’t know if that is official ISKCON dogma or merely some superstition, but I like believing in it so getting it all dealt with timely was satisfying.

We had chose Friday for our appointment as we could pass Rogers right on the way. Rogers is a huge flea market. They advertise 5 miles of walking to see the whole thing. I assume that means walking down both sides of the aisle, but we look at both sides on one pass so that cuts it in half.

Of course, in the winter, most of the outdoor spaces are empty so it wasn’t nearly that far for our visit but I know I walked over a mile, maybe two by the time we carried stuff back to the car a few times. It felt like a couple of miles in any case.

One of the things I bought was some dishes for the temple to leave in the prasadam room. I have brought a lot of theminto  there but, if we need any further proof, communal living doesn’t work as they keep disappearing. As I am committed to a war against Styrofoam or any other type of disposable plate, I keep bringing them in, as do others. I usually get plates from ten to twenty cents so they aren’t even that much more expensive than paper plates, especially the biodegradable ones.

There are usually some available for guests if they want to use them, and more and more residents of the community have gone back to the original New Vrindaban tradition of carrying your own dinnerware to the prasadam room.

I have become discouraged fighting the larger issues so I have to glean some meager joy from seeing even a little progress in day to day affairs.

But I digress – the key point of this post is that Vidya bought a house on Gaura Paurnima!

This is Vidya selling at an NV festival in 1994. The only gourds she did at that time were the rattles and drums shown at the right. Also note the home grown and canned organic stuff at the left. They were too far ahead of the curve and didn’t sell well so we just ate them ourselves.