Rainy and Wet at Ren-Fest

I had fun today!

I went as a chaperone to Texas renaissance Festival with a group of middle school students. The weather was not the greatest for the majority of the day, but it was still a good time. I brought my umbrella, thank you Girls Scouts of America for teaching me to come prepared!

I haven't been out there for years, and everything was just how I remembered it to be. Some of the shoppes were not open (unfortunately the winery shoppe was closed, or I would have come home with a bottle of meade) but there was shopping and food, and I did pass by Her Majesty the Queen during a short downpour.

After my sausage-on-a-stick lunch, I had an ice cream cone and found a semi-dry spot near the bag-piper to take a rest, just before he and the drummer started a short set. I don't know what it is about bagpipes, but for as long as I can remember when I hear pipes and drums, I'm hypnotized to follow. Even when I was 8 and we were in Scotland they had that effect on me.

Well the piper was piping and the drummer was drumming and there was a girl who obviously had some sort of formal training in dance who decided to join up with them and dance a jig. I'm almost positive she was not part of the troupe, her costume was too modern (not sure if that's the word to describe it) but her dancing was beautiful.

So there I sat, eating my vanilla ice cream cone, listening to the music tug at my soul. I sat there in a crowd of middle school students with there parents taking pictures and I bawled my eyes out. The young girl's dancing was beautiful. As she danced, the musicians sped up the tempo and she danced right along with it.

I felt like a bit of a dope sitting there, six months preggers, with hot tears pouring down my cheeks and shoving ice cream into my mouth, but I could not control it. There was nothing I could do to stop. I wished at that moment that I could dance. The beat of the drums made me want to, but even if I weren't preggers, I certainly could not move like that.

Maybe some time, in some life long ago, I could have moved like that. I can feel it in my soul, maybe because I have Scottish and Irish heritage. It is in my blood, so deeply ingrained in my being that its inescapable. And I'm OK with that.