Last week you may have noticed that across the road from my house, where you usually cast a casual eye looking for deer as you motor by, that tiny tent-town had blossomed overnight in the far alfalfa field.
Those tenuous shelters housed a group of about 40 people, including (but not limited to) Boy Scout Troop 51 from Boxford, Massachusetts and their respective parents. They had made the 240-mile trek to brave the elements for three days in Vermont, just as some of the roughest high winds and cool weather we've experienced this year were subsiding. The wind was so severe it blew my Internet satellite dish off plumb, killing all service; there was a brilliant rainbow over their heads when they arrived Friday night.
One of the leaders is Dan's younger brother Giles, who wowed me with his organizational skills, triple-checking reservations for canoes and giving every other Boucher on the farm a pre-arrival task to perform, like delivering large stones for a fire ring and ordering a port-a-john, so that once they were here they could pretty much enjoy themselves.
For our part, my husband Dan and I were to deep-fry a farm-raised turkey at the campsite on Saturday night (after returning from Farmers' Market).
I hadn't ridden up there in years, and our access road has become very funky. The pickup truck rolled and pitched on both sides of the gully; it was like performing a compulsory of slow-driving skills, like a Range-Rover trek course, complete with a steep crest that has no view of where you come down on the other side.
The bird was one of the 36-pound monsters we raised last year, plus another 19-pound supermarket turkey - forty pounds of meat. No problem, as my Dan has fried many a dinner bird. The highlight of the evening was deep- frying chocolate bars and Twinkies for dessert, which ensured our culinary fame.
Now, there were some pretty excited kids peering into a vat of boiling peanut oil to view those treats hissing and puffing up. I was dropping batter-dipped Snickers into the pot just inches from the surface, when there was a "pop!" A speck of oil flew up and tagged me in the arm. No harm done, it wasn't hot enough by the time it touched me to burn, but I had three of the older boys ask me repeatedly if they could administer first aid. I almost let them go ahead and bandage it, but I still had work to do.
I'm not used to that sort of concern, as being a wife on this farm has taught me that burns and scrapes and bloody noses are considered "boo-boos", and not serious injuries worthy of medical ministration.
Our visitors packed up on Sunday and headed to the Alpine Slide in Stowe as their last activity on the way back home. At least those scouts would have one last opportunity to practice their skills at bandaging burns.
