By Amy Nielsen

Today was the last booth of our season for our local grass roots community flea market. Once a month I have been setting up a little booth there to get my name and face out and about in the community. I decided in the spring that I needed to find a way to study my community, to see who really lives here and who comes in the summer. This was one of the ways I chose.

I have had the pleasure of seeing several of the same local vendors month after month. Some I see around the county at the feed and seed or supermarket, others I know are snowbirds up for the summer, most originally from the area, who are soon to be packing up from the camp ground and moving to their southern roosts along the coasts of Florida and North Carolina.

I have tried several tactics each month to showcase different parts of what my practice offers. The last two have been a combination of bake sale for a national charity organization and business offerings table. Before that I showcased aspects as different as healthy eating, joyful exercise, and local partnership organizations I support.

I have a new shared office space and I spent today promoting that space along with the bake sale items for my chosen summer campaign. It was a fun day spent chatting with friends and familiar faces.

I was lucky enough to have my two daughters with me today. It was an opportunity to have them see me in action. All too often, when I ask my younger students what their parents do for a living, they are not able to articulate what it is they do. I think it is really important that kids see and understand at an age appropriate level what their caregivers do for a job.

I happen to really love what I do for a living and am blessed enough to have to opportunity to be working in my field and continuing my schooling at the same time. I also have chosen to homeschool our daughters. To that end, I was able to count today as a school day by allowing them to be in charge of the donation jar for our bake sale while I met new friends.

The day dawned cool and blustery with big puffy summer cloudy and deep blue skies. I shoveled everything for the booth in the car and zoomed out just as the girls were waking up. I arrived at the site and was greeted by my dear friend and event coordinator. I made my way to my spot and unloaded the booth set up.

Part of the reason I really like this event is that they ask the vendors to arrive early enough to have a leisurely set up time. As I have done this now several times, I have a system that works quickly to get the sun shade up and tied down easily and allows me to take the time to shuffle through my materials and feel out what kind of booth I feel like running for the day.

We were asked to use unbaked goods for our bake sale by the owners of the property. We made cookie mixes in a jar using the ultimate pinterest DIY project evening. They were very pretty and effective on the table.

The combination of holistic health coaching and a bake sale seems at first glance cross purposes, but the tie is that I teach kids meditation and the bake sale beneficiary is an organization supporting summer lunch programs for school age kids in our rural county.

The event started off at a slow trickle being middle of the morning on a Sunday in a rural church going community. Our regular summer crowd arrived right on cue about an hour after opening. There was a small lull in the action as everyone slowed for a long slow lunch at one of the area restaurants. The mid-afternoon crowd ended up being mostly newer deep city summer visitors too chilly to be on the lake or in the pool. Another quiet hour then the end of the day rush.

In the past few months, vendors have started to pack up as soon as the last of the fifty-fifty raffles is pulled. Today the weather was so beautiful and the crowd happy to part with a few more pennies, we all lingered a little long before starting to put away the first of the easy to pack trinkets.

By the time we had packed up the booth, the girls had sold three of our jars, two jump ropes and collected five straight donations to our cause. I had handed out four sets of class information and collected another three email addresses for my newsletter. I ran an informal poll and have decided on the next course of action for my practice.

My girls and I rounded up the evening at our local pizza joint then home for ice cream and scrabble. We are all looking forward to selling the remaining cookies in ajar to our friends online to round out our summer campaign. I am happy with the progress this summer project solicited and the ground I gained in being the newest kid on the block in our small rural community. All in all the few dollars I spent each month to pay for my space was well worth it.