As I've mentioned before, I'm a city girl, mostly. Born in New Jersey, I spent my early years in or near large metropolitan areas, except for a couple of years in Libya.

I'd seen cows, at least (not for nothing is New Jersey nicknamed "The Garden State"), and probably a pig or two. Visits to the Bronx Zoo and the National Zoo in Washington left me with plenty of images of wild animals. And horses, donkeys and camels were an everyday sight on the streets of Tripoli, along with herds of sheep and plenty of chickens.

But until we returned to the United States after our assignment in Libya, it's safe to say that my acquaintance with most domesticated animals had usually been at some distance.

Our next duty station was Lincoln Air Force Base, Nebraska, not as far from our usual milieu as Libya, but far enough from the East Coast to seem like the other end of the world, at least to all our relatives, and to be fair, to us, too.

We made the trip by car, without air-conditioning, west across the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the Ohio Turnpike and the Indiana Toll Road, all of them four-lane highways, and then out into Illinois and Iowa on two-lane roads -- 1,300 miles in mid- July.

The farther we got from New Jersey, the flatter the terrain became. The Appalachian range gave way to rolling country in Ohio and Indiana and then to the more level stretches of land in Illinois and southern Iowa. Cities became towns, towns became small villages … and soon there were long stretches of farms and endless waves of corn … corn and corn and more corn.

After we arrived in Lincoln, not the small town we'd imagined it to be, but a "real" city, and found a place to live, my parents set about finding something to entertain three children. A trip to the Nebraska State Fair, they felt, would be educational and entertaining at the same time.

From the moment we entered the fairgrounds, it was like being on another planet.

We went through all of the display buildings, at least that's how I remember it. Cages of rabbits, pens of pigs, sheep and cows, stables of horses, long tables filled with plates of endless varieties of vegetables, knitting displays, hanging quilts, flower arrangements, pies and cakes of every flavor.

There were demonstrations of a wide variety - gardening, cooking, electricity and appliances of the future, how to tie fishing lures, and farm equipment displays.

And, oh, the Midway, with wild rides, games of chance and skill, enormous stuffed animals to take home if you could ring the bell, hit the target, or knock down bowling pins. And there was racing, too -- harness racing and stock car racing - two more opposite venues would be hard to imagine.

Of course, there was food -- every variety of gut-busting, bad-for-you treat under the sun, including some I'd never heard of, like corn dogs, funnel cakes and kolaches, a fruit-filled pastry with its roots in Czechoslovakia. Nebraska, I soon learned, had a very large Czech population.

There were commercial demonstrations, too. Special brooms available nowhere else, mops that cleaned floors with practically no effort, gleaming silver pots and pans that cooked without the need for water or oil, and medical treatments for smelly feet, bad backs and ugly teeth.

My parents could not have picked a better place to illustrate to my sister and me what the "heart of America" was really like.

As I wandered around Missouri's State Fair a week ago, what stood out to me was not how different it was from Nebraska's fair of more than 50 years ago, but how little difference there was between the two - how little change there had been from one state to another in so many years.

There were still the smiling young kids from FFA and 4-H with their carefully groomed animals, still the earnest demonstrations of cooking and needlecraft, still the rides, still the funnel cakes and the corndogs, still the perfect vegetables and fruits, and still the waterless cookware. There were still the rows of cages of perfect animals -- goats, pigs, chickens and rabbits and more.

There was still racing -- harness racing and car racing and there were big horses and still-bigger horses, including many barns with Percherons and Clydesdales, the giants of the horse world.

The Midway still had all the thrill rides of the past and plenty of new ones, too. Bigger, faster and scarier.

And, for me, there was still every bit of the wonder and awe I experienced the first time I went to the fair such a long time ago.

Harvest festivals and fairs have been around a very long time, stretching back even to Roman times. In the U.S., that history is a little shorter, but the state of Michigan claims the distinction of holding the nation's first state fair in 1849. Nebraska's state fair dates to 1869, when the state was not yet even a state. In Missouri, the state fair began in 1901.

To non-farmers, the fair is likely more an entertainment venue focused on the midway, the racing and the nightly concerts. It's another of many ways to have fun.

But these annual celebrations of the art and science of farming are an entirely different event for those in the farming community. They are entertaining, of course, but they are also a way for farm families all over the state to show off the results of their labors in the past year, to meet again with old friends and gather strength for another year's effort.

In a time when we are worried and frightened about the state of the world and our position in it, it is reassuring to know that we are still a country rich in the ability to feed itself and rich in people who are willing to take all the risks associated with that process and still have fun doing it.

Corny, you say? Yes, it is, and I'm proud to say I had as much fun basking in that corniness last week as I did the first time.

It's too late this year, but next year when you go to the fair, try to look at the spectacle in a different way. Maybe you'll see that everything "old" is new again.

*Rogers & Hammerstein II