Daughters galore and a shocking reappraisal

I have to clear something up. Renee Boucher, recent graduate of MVU is not my daughter as reported in The St. Albans Messenger weeks ago (people are still asking me where I am sending her to college). And NCPR (North Country Public Radio) deemed another girl (a friend) my ‘adopted daughter’ in a feature last fall – I kept insisting that she was not my child, and the interviewer took it to mean something entirely different. Since then, the amount of daughters attributed to me has flourished. Frankly, I would be proud to claim them all; I am flattered anyone would conclude that these impossibly tall and rather blonde girls could emerge from the gene pool I swim in. However, it is simply not so. http://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/archive.php?id=10148
is where you can still see my faux family Boucher, featuring Hunter, who was helping to mind our stand that day.


Besides being labeled “mom” once again, I feel like a queen! The town’s reappraisal notices arrived this week and my home, previously worth $182,500
(quite frankly all anyone should pay for it, given its proximity to the dairy, a view of the ubiquitous giant plastic tarp tire pile of fermented feedstuffs, as well as being located across the road from
Boucher Fertilizer with its seasonal traffic and hubbub) is now valued at $303,600. Wow. I don’t even have a sea-mint pond or a tennis court, and I didn’t do anything like “flipping it” in order to get a higher property value. Maybe the poultry coops are bumping up the value as a scenic country vista?


Seems a lot of folks are experiencing upswings of fortune. So many of us lucky, lucky rural Highgatonians are living in homes we can theoretically offer for $100,000 more (and then some) than what we put into them! We should all sell up now and get larger digs in Oklahoma, where I hear the cost of living is much lower.


I doubt that I could get a New England king’s ransom for “the red house” (as it’s known) even if I tried; besides its misfortunate locale, all the windows need replacing, there’s a moss patch eating a hole into the west side of the garage roof, my backyard is either harvested four times a year or covered in claustrophobic ‘Children of the Corn’ stalks, and we have hard sulfur/iron-water that dingies the laundry and stinks up the house. I’m a farmer, and even I have issues with the noise from big trucks gearing up and down at all hours.

And lastly, (just to catch you up) four hundred and fifty dollars later, I have two scales that accomplish what the State of Vermont insisted I must do: weigh and mark cheese for sale just like the most modern Wal-Mart. Stuff and bother! I have one scale that measures weight in ounces and another that calculates price per pound – more than I wanted to spend, but less costly than a machine that performs both functions.