FFA Parade Cancelled

FFA Parade Cancelled, May 24th, 2020

The Future Farmers of America Parade in Healdsburg is a big deal. It is held the Thursday before the Memorial Day Weekend. The horses and parade floats would go by our house. I’d draw a FFA Parade chalk drawing on our corner every year for 20 years.

But not this year. The parade was cancelled. And so was the livestock auction on the grounds just south of Giorgi Park on the baseball diamond and the high school football field. No farm animals to be shown. No arcades or corn dogs to be sold.

Someone didn’t get the memo. Debra walks through Giorgi Park (it has the tennis courts in the photo) every day on her walk. The public restrooms there have been closed for two months, but yesterday the city put in two porta-potties.

And Debra saw farm animals and bales of hay by those brown buildings next to the baseball diamond. We wondered if the Memorial Day FFA event was still going to happen.

But today the hay and farm animals were gone. Fortunately the porta-potties remained.

The Oak Mound Cemetery is to the right/east of Giorgi Park and the baseball diamond. One wonders if the cemetery folks are winning the day today. Is life to be stopped for this virus?

Healdsburg is a tourist town in Sonoma County surrounded by vineyards and great bicycle routes. We have many hotels in town. They are all closed. The bars are closed, unless they also serve food and then it is only take-out. Masks must be worn while picking up the food and drinks. Absolutely no drinking allowed in the plaza or on the sidewalks. This isn’t Las Vegas.

Maybe the churches will open tomorrow. You can see the Catholic church a block from our house in the FFA Parade photo from years past. It’s a nice church.
I miss making the chalk drawing, but my back doesn’t. Is this how our society dies? By these small cuts of things that made us happy and are now no more?

It’s all just so very sad and unnecessary. And there’s been way too much of that lately.

TJM