If Saturday's weather appears as billed, sixty degrees and sunny, and if my lady is free of any of those damnable side effects then we will be headed to Malabar farm for their annual Heritage days festivities. It's simple entertainment that a farm and perhaps a little music can provide.
We've been to many of the festivals, weather permitting, and always feel better after being there. I, of course, always feel good about the beginning also. After being transported to the farm proper from our parking space in one of the fields by a farm wagon drawn by a tractor I usually follow an aroma of doughnuts cooking in large kettles and coffee by the gallons brewing and ready for dunking or for the more genteel a few sips between bites of the cinnamon laden doughnuts. The picture I saw on Flickr reminded me of this.
Malabar was the home of author Louis Bromfield and he would be greatly pleased to see the turnouts that are usually generated. Weather is of course the key. Bromfield was a writer of great renown in the thirties and forties, a winner of a Pulitzer, and at one time thought of and mentioned in the same breath with Fitzgerald and other of his ilk. He was known as the man who had everything. Money from his fiction, and his books being turned into movies, the Rains Came being one. He was friends with all the great writers and actors from Hollywood. He invited many of them to the farm and they came. Life was wonderful and lucrative for everything he touched. He also wrote non-fiction about life on the farm He loved life at Malabar and had to be coaxed by his business manager to please write more fiction as money was running out. The joy went out of his writing and writings about the farm was not too lucrative. His wife died, his daughters married and departed to lives of their own and he contracted cancer. He ran out of money and his great friend Doris Duke saw to it that he was taken care of in his final illness.
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