Hello, all!
This past weekend was Cleveland Pagan Pride Days, the big Cleveland area gathering that usually happens in late August every year. It started in 2009, and has happened every year except, of course, 2020 (due to the pandemic). I was actually a bit surprised that it continued this year, since the organization's other event, the Cleveland Witches Ball which usually takes place in October, was already cancelled due to the continued rise in cases of the Delta variant. Cleveland Pagan Pride Days (CLE PPD for short) is an outdoor event, but it is usually very crowded in all the small booths, and hundreds of people attend. There were certainly very crowded times, but there were also some more spacious moments, thankfully. I also noticed that most vendors arranged their booths with tables on the outside edges to keep browsing to the walkways, and not have people enter the small tented areas. Many people did wear masks, or have them handy for more crowded instances. (I was working at a booth, so I didn't wear my mask while at the booth, but I put it on any time I walked out into the event itself, into the crowds, to the bathrooms, and so on.)
I have a couple blog posts in the works, saved as drafts here, but I wanted to publish this as a quick note just to say hello, we're here, and to celebrate a little milestone!
It seems like a lot of people who were at CLE PPD on Sunday when I was working were people who had never been to the event before, and some who had never been to ANY Pagan Pride event before. Similarly, several people from our own growing Ohio Reclaiming Witchcraft community also decided to come out to meet up! Because of this, over the course of the weekend I was able to meet four more people from our little online community space, in person! I will leave names out of this public-facing blog post for privacy reasons, since this is visible to anyone on the internet. But two people came to visit me at work (at the museum) on Saturday, and two others met up with me at the museum's booth at Pride on Sunday! We got to chat about future plans for this community, and possible ways to proceed with slowly getting people together, considering the continuing safety of everyone re: the virus. Online rituals and meet-ups are certainly possible, and hopefully more simple to get started with for people's varying schedules.