Looks like we are going to miss the State Fair this year. But we did not miss out on all the fun, as we spent yesterday, at least a few hours of it, at the first annual Cotton Harvest Festival in beautiful downtown Kerens, Texas.

In case you don’t know the place, Kerens is a wide spot on Highway 31, about halfway between Corsicana and Athens. The reference to the State Fair is apropos because Kerens main claim to fame, or at least the one mentioned most often, is that Big Tex, the symbol of the State Fair, originated there as a Santa Claus. He stood right there in the block pictured above as a Christmas season attention-getter. The merchants who came up with the idea and who later sold the statue, have all since shut their doors. Not a lot is happening in Kerens anymore.

The town’s other claim to fame, in my book at least, is that it was the hometown of my parents. They both grew up on nearby farms and this was where everybody came on Saturdays to buy supplies and have a good time. According to Dad the crowd was so thick here on Saturdays you could hardly walk through it. My cousin who grew up in Kerens in the fifties has written some stories about the place. When my grandmother was still alive, we used to come to downtown Kerens once in a while. It still had grocery stores and all kinds of businesses along this street even in those days.

I still have relatives living there. One of them helped organize this little shindig as a fundraiser to build a new town library. Tricia and I stopped off at the old library and were given a tour by an octogenerian lady, who knew exactly who I was just as soon as I mentioned my parent’s name. We walked down the red-brick street to the Presbyterian Church to see the quilt show and the same thing happened there. The lady at the church even had some stories to tell about my Dad. Made me almost feel like it is my home town too.

We stayed a couple hours there, bought tee shirts and hand-made soap and barbecue, and then left to attend to some other business. After dark we stopped back by to check out the street dance. There was a live band playing Willy Nelson songs and other old standards. We sat on a bench and watched while an old man taught his granddaughter how to do the two-step.