This past weekend my wife had this wonderful idea,well in her mind anyway. Let us gather the clan and go to "The Backwoods Fest".The fest is composed of grown old hippies,professional flea marketers,tree huggers and general free spirits. And the reason I go, the world's greatest bean soup. Home made,hearty,and slow cooked it is the food of gods. It also figures in my story later.
Gabe and his mother were running in a fund raiser for his school so Ethan represented The Little Rat Pack on this outing. His mother, two sister-in-laws and my favorite brother-in -law rounded out our group. Once we arrived I felt like a dingy of khaki in a sea of denim. But ya know I kinda liked it. Most of the vendors seemed ... well happy.They were enjoying what they were doing and it showed. Ethan got out of his granddad powered Radio Flyer to watch a man cutting out things with a pedal-powered bandsaw. When he finished, he took the piece he had just cut ,gave it to Ethan and thanked him for watching so intently. It was a small bison, which Ethan named "Piggy" for some reason only his 4 year old mind found logical. My wife bought wooden trucks for the boys from the man, so maybe it was just a marketing ploy. But on this pleasant near Autumn afternoon even my cynical mind didn't think so.
OK now back to the bean soup. We had just seated our group down to feast on our soup.Man oh man it was good. Suddenly there was a crash from the other side of the area. Two women were wrestling , punching, and rolling around in "the mud,the blood,and the beer".( OK,OK! technically it was mud and bean soup, but don't you just love to say "the mud,the blood,and the beer"? Thank you Johnny Cash.)It didn't last long, people broke it up almost at once. Security men escorted the them away and my clever wife told Ethan they had fallen in the mud. The story we got a little later was woman A had opened a jar of baby food and it had sprayed on woman B, who was sitting at the next table. "B" then grabbed a handful of soup,I told you it was hearty,and flung it onto "A" proclaiming" how do you like it?!" And as the poets say "the fight was on". My big city sister-in-law was awe struck and wide eyed when she said" Well now I see why its called backwoods!" Ya can't make this stuff up, but ya gotta love it.
