The Blue Ribbon at the County Fair

On a warm Wednesday morning in the last week of July, at a folding table under the white canvas of the Home Arts tent on the fairgrounds of the Vernon County Fair in Viroqua, Wisconsin, a seventy-eight-year-old retired agricultural extension agent named Adele Bergstrom — Del to her three sisters and to the two roommates she had, in a corner double on the second floor of Murphy Hall in the fall of 1965 — sets down, for the forty-fourth summer in a row, a small pint mason jar of red raspberry preserves.

The jar is labeled, in her own round hand, on a strip of masking tape that has been folded once so it will not stick to the ring: A. Bergstrom, Coon Valley, 2026.

Outside the tent, the black-and-white Holsteins in the 4-H barn are being hosed down for the afternoon show. The little pipe organ on the midway is playing In the Good Old Summertime. A boy of about seven is holding a helium balloon shaped like a pig, and a woman of about forty — Adele's neighbor from the next farm over, Kirsten Nyland — is holding the boy's other hand and telling him, gently, that the pig is not for eating.

Inside the tent, at the long table under the fluorescent tubes the fair board bought at Menards in 2011, the county extension homemakers association has laid out, in six neat rows on white butcher paper, one hundred and thirty-one jars of jam, jelly, preserves, marmalade, chutney, and, from a Mennonite woman near Westby, a small dark jar of elderberry syrup that Adele will privately think is the best thing on the table.

Adele sets her jar down in the fifth row, third from the left. She smooths the ring. She steps back.

She has been doing this on a Wednesday morning in the last week of July since the summer of 1983.

What the ribbon says by four

By four in the afternoon, in the small careful handwriting of a woman named June Iverson — seventy-one, retired dental hygienist, chair of the preserves-and-jellies committee since 1998 — a small strip of blue satin has been pinned to the neck of Adele's jar with a straight pin. The strip reads, in gold foil letters that will be a little tarnished by supper:

First Place, Red Raspberry — Vernon County Fair 2026.

It is Adele's forty-second blue.

June, who has known Adele since Cal Bergstrom coached the Coon Valley Little League in the summer of 1979 and June's son Peter played second base, does not tell Adele in advance. She tells the Vernon County Broadcaster.

The Broadcaster's photographer, a nineteen-year-old named Emmett Lund who is home from UW–La Crosse for the summer and who has been given, by the paper's editor Doris Halverson, the un-glamorous job of shooting the Home Arts tent, sets up his Nikon on the tripod at four-fifteen. He asks Adele, in the small unhurried way of a boy raised by parents who taught him to say ma'am, whether she would mind holding the jar.

Adele holds the jar.

She smiles the small, tired, pleased smile of a widow of seven years who is standing under a canvas tent on a Wednesday afternoon in July with a jar of raspberry preserves and a piece of blue ribbon Cal would have quietly, over supper, told her he was proud of.

Emmett takes three frames.

He asks her, for the caption, to spell her name.

B-E-R-G-S-T-R-O-M.

The paper is on the porches by three on Friday.

What Doris sets on Friday morning

Doris Halverson, sixty-six, editor of the Vernon County Broadcaster since 1994, sets Emmett's photograph on page seven of the Friday edition, above a two-column-inch caption that reads:

Adele Bergstrom of Coon Valley took first place in red raspberry preserves at the Vernon County Fair on Wednesday afternoon, her forty-second blue ribbon in the Home Arts tent. Mrs. Bergstrom has entered preserves at the fair every summer since 1983. She is a longtime member of the Vernon County Extension Homemakers Association and the widow of the late Calvin Bergstrom, who taught agricultural mechanics at Westby High School from 1972 to 2014.

Doris does not send the paper to anyone in La Crosse.

She has never been asked to.

What the CRM has, on the same Friday

Somewhere on the second floor of a converted brick building at the edge of a small Franciscan college's campus on the bluffs above the Mississippi in La Crosse, on the same Friday morning at nine-oh-four, the record for Adele K. Bergstrom, class of 1968, reads as follows.

Address: S3421 County Highway P, Coon Valley, Wisconsin. Class: 1968. Degree: Agricultural extension certificate, 1968. Spouse: Calvin R. Bergstrom (deceased 2019). Giving since: 1970. Last gift: June 4, 2024. $50. Status: Lapsed.

There is no field on the record for the fifth row, third from the left, at the long table under the white canvas of the Home Arts tent on the fairgrounds of the Vernon County Fair on the last Wednesday in July.

There is no field on the record for the forty-second blue ribbon.

There is no field on the record for June Iverson, chair of the preserves-and-jellies committee since 1998.

There is no field on the record for Emmett Lund, nineteen, home for the summer from UW–La Crosse, working the four o'clock shift for Doris on a Wednesday afternoon in the last week of July for eleven dollars an hour and a Diet Coke.

The record does not know that Adele is, on the same Friday morning at nine-oh-four, on her front porch on County Highway P, in the same porch rocker Cal built her at the Westby High School shop in the winter of 1988, reading page seven of the Broadcaster, with a mug of Sanka and a small quiet tear that no CRM has ever had a field for, because she is holding, in her lap, a photograph of a woman she does not always still recognize as herself.

By September the annual appeal from La Crosse, addressed Dear Friend, will land in her mailbox. It will not mention Cal. It will not mention the fair. It will not mention the ribbon. It will be signed, in a font, by the vice president for advancement.

Adele will read the first paragraph.

She will put the letter, still open, on the kitchen counter.

She will forget to write the check.

What Rōmy is doing about it

Rōmy does not stand under the canvas of the Home Arts tent on Wednesday afternoons in the last week of July.

It does not carry Emmett's tripod, and it is not going to buy Doris a cup of the Kwik Trip coffee she drinks at seven forty-two on Friday mornings while she lays out page seven on the light table in the small back room off the Broadcaster's front counter on Main Street.

What Rōmy does is smaller than that. It is a reading.

Rōmy reads the small papers.

All of them. The Vernon County Broadcaster, the Westby Times, the Viroqua Independent, the La Crosse Tribune, the Coulee Region Almanac. It reads the Country Today out of Eau Claire, and the Farm & Dairy out of Salem, Ohio, and the small Amish weekly out of Cashton that is set in the same 11-point Baskerville a Mennonite printer named Joel Beiler has been setting since 1997. It reads the Home Arts results on page seven. It reads the Junior Fair Sale results on page nine. It reads the small typewritten paragraphs at the bottom of column three — Coon Valley Notes, Around Westby, Chaseburg Chatter — in the plain unhurried way Nan Fogarty read the Recorder on the second floor over Federal Street Books in Greenfield.

It cross-references — quietly, in the corner of the associate director of advancement's screen at eight-fifty on a Monday morning — every name against the CRM.

On the Monday morning after Doris's Friday paper, Rōmy puts, at the top of the associate director's list, a small quiet note:

Adele K. Bergstrom, class of 1968 (agricultural extension certificate, June 1968), longtime donor from 1970 to 2024, widow of Calvin Bergstrom (Westby High School ag-mechanics teacher, 1972–2014), took first place in the red raspberry division at the Vernon County Fair on Wednesday afternoon — her forty-second blue ribbon. The Vernon County Broadcaster ran her photograph on page seven of Friday's edition, above a caption written by Doris Halverson (editor, since 1994). Suggested: one plain cream card, this week, in your own hand, to S3421 County Highway P, Coon Valley — congratulating her by name on the forty-second, mentioning Cal (if it isn't a bother), and — only if it isn't — asking whether she might mail us a jar for the president's office on the second floor of Murphy Hall, where a jar of Adele Bergstrom's raspberry preserves has, in the plain unsentimental reading, belonged since the June of 1968. Would you like a draft, in your own voice?

The card goes out on Tuesday.

Adele reads it on Thursday, on the porch, with her second cup of Sanka.

She writes back on Friday, in the small round hand she has been writing thank-you notes in since Mrs. Iverson's fourth-grade classroom at Coon Valley Elementary in the fall of 1954. She mails a jar the following Wednesday, in a small padded envelope she buys at the Kwik Trip, addressed to the president's office on the second floor of Murphy Hall.

By November she is on the calendar for coffee at the small bakery on Third Street in Viroqua with a young woman from the alumni office whose grandmother, Adele will discover halfway through the second cup, was the county extension supervisor who signed Adele's certificate in the June of 1968.

By December the check she forgot to write in September arrives, in the same round hand, for four figures instead of two. In the memo line, in blue ink, in nineteen careful characters:

In memory of Cal.

The paper was never the point. The ribbon was never the point. The jar was never the point.

The reading was the point.

A small assignment, with love ♡

This week, before anything else, do one small unfashionable thing.

Pick, from your lapsed-donor list, the three whose zip codes belong to a county with a fair. If you cannot remember which three, pick the three whose last gift was under a hundred dollars and whose loyalty on your file goes back further than the associate director of advancement has been alive.

Go to the website of the small weekly in each of the three counties. If the paper does not have a website — and about a third of them, in Wisconsin and Iowa and the Ozark Plateau, still do not — call the county extension office and ask, in your kindest voice, whether the office secretary would mail you the last four issues. She will. She has been waiting for a reason to.

Turn to page seven. Read the Home Arts results, or the Junior Fair Sale column, or the small typewritten paragraph at the bottom of column three that begins Community Notes.

If a name you know is set in it — a donor, a donor's spouse, a donor's granddaughter with a red heifer in the Junior Fair — take a plain cream Crane's card from the top drawer of the credenza.

Do not put a case for support in it.

Do not put a QR code in it.

Do not sign it with a title.

Write three sentences, in blue ink, in your own hand. Say the donor's name once. Say the small specific thing the paper printed — the forty-second blue, the red heifer, the neighbor's boy holding the pig-shaped balloon. Say, in the plain language of a person who was paying attention, that you saw her on page seven.

Walk it, on your lunch break, to the post office on your corner.

The Home Arts tent at the Vernon County Fair comes down on Sunday night.

June Iverson has been chairing the preserves-and-jellies committee since 1998.

Doris Halverson has been setting page seven, in twelve-point Times, since 1994.

They have been holding the fifth row, third from the left, for you.

Turn to it. ♡