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didn’t pay for it all himself. His donation just got the ball rolling. That hospitality suite has needed renovation for years.”
    “Grab yourself a pig board, girls,” Marguerite said, patting her silvery bob, her sky blue eyes twinkling with patient humor. “We need all the wranglers we can get out there.”
    “Ladies, choose your weapons.” Her slim, dark-haired daughter, Laurie, pointed to the pile of two-by-three-foot rectangular plywood boards painted green and designed with hand holds, sort of like a huge painter’s palette. They’d been spruced up by Marguerite and Laurie, both talented tole painters who belonged to the Artists’ Co-op. One side of the boards depicted bright pink pig faces, their snouts open in exaggerated screams. The other side boasted in large white letters—Swine Escort.
    Unlike lambs and cattle, there was no way pigs could be trained to stand still long enough for the judge to consider conformation and finer points of porcine excellence. Photos of pig judging were the ones that often made the local newspapers because there was a good chance something funny happened when you had twenty 4-H kids wielding “pig sticks,” twenty hogs avoiding said sticks and as many wranglers as you could, well, wrangle into being there to shove their pig board between two agitated pigs.
    “I’m taken,” Maggie said to Marguerite. “I have a two-hour stint as docent in the Family Farm exhibit building.” She turned to me. “Have you seen the exhibits yet?”
    I grabbed a pig board. “Haven’t seen anything yet. I’ve spent most of my time getting the museum booth ready.”
    “The judging’s been quite . . . uh . . . controversial this year.”
    “When isn’t it? I’ll come by when I’m through here.” I glanced over at Marguerite for confirmation. “When am I free?”
    “We should be done by noon,” she said.
    “See you later,” Maggie said, with a wave.
    I tucked the Booster Buddies all-access pass hanging from a lanyard around my neck inside my Josiah Sinclair Folk Art Museum T-shirt and spent the next few hours doing enough aerobic exercise chasing after swine to qualify me for a couple more days eating off Mustang Sallie’s menu.
    After my hog-wrangling duty, on the way to agriculture building no. 1 where the Family Farm exhibits were displayed, I decided to check out the situation at the folk art museum booth. It was twelve thirty and the fairgrounds had been open to the public for a half hour. Since it was Friday, we expected a larger and hopefully more shopping-inclined crowd than on the fair’s first two days when a good part of the fair’s visitors consisted of frugal, retired folks or summer camp kids on field trips. The fair officially opened on Wednesday, so this was our first weekend night. Kathy Mattea’s long-anticipated concert would kick the fair into high gear.
    The folk art museum’s booth was located on Artisans’ Row, next to Bears Quilt Shop, a new quilt store that just opened in the seaside town of Cayucos. I took special pride in our museum and co-op’s booth because I’d talked the Booster Buddies and the city of San Celina into cosponsoring it. Most folk artists barely made enough money to eat and pay rent, so the expensive retail space at the fair was beyond their means. This access to the public both provided them a little more income and advertised our museum. Constance Sinclair, the wealthy, longtime resident of San Celina County who donated her family’s adobe ranch house and stables that housed the folk art museum, had given her seal of approval to my suggestion, thus convincing the city officials who held the purse strings that the money was being put to good use.
    We’d worked hard at making the booth both fun and educational with a varied representation of our artists’ work—quilts, wood carvings, tole, acrylic and watercolor painting, greeting cards, duck decoys, fiber arts, leather carving and horsehair hitching, the art of braiding