Land Lunch

            Today we had lunch on the land. Yesterday we had packed lunches and stored them in the refrigerator, so today we grabbed them and set off into the wilderness (except one group, who apparently ate on the porch). My group went through the farmstead and into the forest, where we stopped to eat at the sugar shack. The sugar shack is a small, inconspicuous building placed near a creek that winds through the trees. One wall is missing and the roof is made of corrugated plastic plates. These plates were originally put there to let in light, or so I am told. Now they are piled with branches and leaves and snow. The entire shack is made of wood, some of which is slightly bent or rotted, giving the shack an air of age and use. We sat in the middle of the shack, giving us a space of about five by ten feet. There were two logs in the middle, which we used as benches. As we ate we had a discussion of what was going well and what needed work on the Farmstay. This discussion was progressing quite nicely when it was interrupted by a group of nine or so deer moving in a procession through the woods. We had to restrain the dogs at this point, as they were straining to get at the herbivores that were so tantalizingly close. We sat and watched the deer as they passed; some females and their young. I didn’t see a buck. After the deer were out of sight, the dogs calmed down; one still perked up occasionally, as though it had caught a scent on the wind or perhaps a faint noise. We kept up our conversation, which drifted eventually to morals. When we finished our lunches, we began the trek back to the homestead. Andy stopped at the farmstead on the way to put the dogs back inside, and the rest of us continued to the homestead. This little excursion into the wilderness was a good way to escape from routine, instead of sitting and eating lunch inside. We also had an amazing wildlife sighting. I hope personally that we have another of these land lunches. It is a fun way to both get our nutrition and have a discussion about going-ons at the land school.

by Cole