Reporter's Reflections – Arnoldsburg Molasses Festival
by Lisa Minney
Reporter, Calhoun Chronicle (website)
It is difficult to explain to a city person the simple joys of rural life; to detail life’s options to young adults who say, “there’s nothing to do.” It is just as difficult to explain to others the simplistic joys of a hometown festival.
To those unfamiliar, boiling cane sap to make syrup seems a simple concept, and in Calhoun, bluegrass and gospel can seem like an every day thing. We’ve all seen parades, had grilled chicken, and walked through displays of produce.
But until you’ve done it in Arnoldsburg, you just can’t comprehend.
It takes an entire season to grow cane, which must be cut, stripped, and squeezed. When the sap is boiled, it needs specific temperatures, tubs, and timing. It is judged to be ready by its thickness and its color. Boiling sap may seem simple, but its a science.
This festival includes the best in music--the high school band, gospel and bluegrass, with musicians sometimes joining each other on stage. White-haired ladies in tap shoes lead on the dance floor, and young and old dance, sing, and play music together. This doesn’t happen every day, and it doesn’t happen enough in the world.
The parade is the parade of all parades--with more gowns, queens, contestants, horses, carriages, politicians, trucks, cars and kids than any other I have witnessed in rural West Virginia. There were 38 entries in the horse division alone. Not only did candy rain down on children, but the crowd was also treated to free flowers (and political brochures).
And grilled chicken? This ain’t no backyard barbecue. Three hundred and fifty chicken halves. Seven hundred pounds of chicken, served with gallons of baked beans, cole slaw, lemonade and tea, and hundreds of rolls. Some went back for soup beans and cornbread, or had a taco salad.
I saw a sunflower head that was more than a foot wide. Saw pickle relish jars that included not one single seed. (Something I have not yet mastered.) I touched a letter mailed from The White House during Reagan’s presidency, thanking Glenna Fleming for sending copies of books on the Molasses Festival. I ran my fingers along stitches that took someone else’s fingers hours to stitch.
On more than one occasion, I witnessed three or four generations in the faces before me.
There’s a joy in simplicity. In hard work. In tradition and family.
I left the festival with that rosy feeling; home to change and head to the barn. Frank threw bales up from the wagon to his mother and I while our three-year-old niece watched from a lawn chair, eating chocolate ice cream.
When the wagon was empty, and the ice cream gone, we piled her into the wagon with us to get the remaining bales in the field. A breeze cooling the sweat on my face, I looked up to see a grandmother laughing at her granddaughter’s joy of riding in the hay wagon.
From those faces I looked to the sunset, and how it shone down on fields now almost cleared for the winter. Smiling, I realized I was in a Norman Rockwell painting. My whole day had been like a Norman Rockwell painting.
There are times when the beauty of the world around you brings an awesome, simple clarity which washes over you like a long-held sigh of relief. You realize life is simple, if you only learn to see the joy in simple living. I have often thought, at those moments, that God was blowing a soothing breeze across my face saying, “Relax. All is well.”
That’s the feeling that comes with the Molasses Festival--a celebration of simple things.