Monday is Labor Day, a holiday set aside to celebrate workers everywhere that have strived to build a better world while providing for their families.

It means many things to many people.

For people who live in Washington County it means that it is fair weekend. Held over the weekend every year, it is genius that it is a four-day celebration of agriculture that occurs on a weekend that has an extra day. Earlier in my career I would end up working at the fair, carrying a ton of camera equipment up and down the midway.

Stop by the fair this weekend and thank some of the farmers displaying their animals. It is because of them that we all have plenty of food to eat. I always worked up an appetite while laboring from one grand champion to another – there is plenty of fair food on hand if you get hungry there, with a lot of it being part of fund raisers for local groups.

I get the day off now and I normally try to enjoy the outdoors.

Several times this has involved kayaking with friends who happen to also be long distance runners. This has made for a different kind of Labor Day. They are a very competitive bunch. I finally quit taking a camera with me because I knew they would scare all the wildlife away. The first time I went with them on the Hocking River I swear to God they did not stop paddling for a solid hour. Like I said, they put the labor in Labor Day.

Night classes at Marietta College are held on Labor Day, which means that whatever torture, I mean fun, that I put myself through during the day, I have to be presentable and ready to teach photography at night. After eight hours in a kayak one year, I could barely pick up my arms.

We have repeated the Labor Day torture, I mean kayak adventure, several times over the years.

Labor Day also marks the traditional end of summer. The real end of summer is several weeks away but because we are all returning to our fall routines, it just seems like fall even though the calendar says otherwise.

I moved to Marietta on Labor Day weekend in 1974. We went to the Washington County Fair with my new neighbors and got ready to go to school on Tuesday. School once started the day after Labor Day, which is one of the reasons it feels like the end of summer.

On that Tuesday 51 years ago. I walked to my first day of eighth day at Marietta Middle School. On my way home I decided to take a different route since the one to school had been so hilly. The kid version of me was not yet accustomed to Ohio hills and I ended up somewhere in Norwood before eventually finding my way home to Aurora Street, a street I later learned was one of the highest in Marietta.

No matter what kind of labor you do, enjoy your day off on Monday. If you must work while the rest of us take a break, thank you for doing what you do to keep things running.

Art Smith is online manager of the Parkersburg News and Sentinel and The Marietta Times. He can be reached at asmith@mariettatimes.com