In the summer of 1985 Dum-Dum lived up to her name. One night in August she was barking up a storm by the patio door, so we put her out on the tie-out, and she went racing out, barking madly. Big fucking mistake! She was barking because a skunk managed to slip inside the fence around the pool. Moments later Dum-Dum came roaring back and tried to come inside. Marilyn opened the door, and then yelled and we dragged the dog back outside. Tomato juice was supposed to kill the smell, and we found a can and I went out and we gave her a bath, but oh God did she stink! I looked around and didn't find a dead skunk, so I didn't even have the satisfaction of knowing the little bastard had paid for his sins. Dum-Dum and the deck stunk for days!
In the fall of 1985 I revived an old pastime of ours, old to me at least, from my first life, new to Marilyn. I taught her how to make jams and jellies. On our property in Cooperstown we had about five acres of mostly scrub, but it had an abundance of blackberries and elderberries and a few apple trees on it. After we started picking berries, we decided to try making jam. It isn't very high tech at all, it's fairly easy, if time consuming, is relatively cheap, and it works. Every year we would do several batches of blackberry and elderberry, and Marilyn would go out and buy blueberries and strawberries. The apples we made pies from and she learned how to cook them into apple sauce. Then we cooked up some pumpkins and made pie filling.
We called it all 'Buckman's Berries' and put it in Mason jars and saved it and gave it to friends and family. Since the only way to do it required the both of us working on it, it was an excellent way to do something together on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. We would do a few batches and chat and talk about the kids or the business or the school or anything, and just work together for a few hours. It was good for us then, and it was good for us now. I knew all the little tricks, because we had done it for almost forty years. The end result was jam better than anything that Smucker's ever made, because ours was made with love! For Maggie's wedding, she had us make 140 jars of strawberry jam as the combination wedding centerpieces/place-tags, and we made jam for weeks before the wedding!
As for the pies, well, there is no such thing as a bad pie!
Like most parents, we found the most hilarity with our children. Charlie liked me to take him to Bucky's races, and Marilyn was happy to let us go and get out of her hair. The babies didn't like the noise and would fuss a lot. Once Charlie was comfortable riding his bicycle, he and Bucky started dirt biking around the lower half of our property. We figured this out during the summer of 1985, when the Tusks were over for a Saturday barbecue. As we all sat there on the back deck, we watched as the Daring Duo headed up the hill into the woods, and dragged back a fallen down tree. Well, Bucky mostly did the dragging, but Charlie tried to help. When we asked, mystified, what they were up to, plans to build a jump ramp were announced. Marilyn was not amused, and threatened both Tusker and me if Charlie got hurt.
Tusker and I just shook our heads in disbelief. This deserved another beer, at the minimum! We had a pair of adrenaline junkies on our hands.
It became quite apparent that both Bucky and Charlie were little daredevils. We got to calling them Batman and Robin. Bucky would come up with some crazy stunt and Charlie would join in. It wasn't like Bucky even had to talk my son into it, either. Charlie volunteered!
This all came to a painful head in February of 1986. It doesn't snow all that much in Maryland, but it does snow, and we got several inches one Friday night. The next morning we called the Tusks and invited them over to go sledding. By ten or so they pulled up in their minivan and piled out. Their house was a nice high-ranch model with a wonderful finished basement set up as a playroom/prison for their boys, but they lived in a development and only had about a quarter acre of flat lawn. We, on the other hand had a nice gentle slope perfect for sledding.
Once they arrived, we quickly dressed the kids and went outside. Holly, Molly, and Carter got propped up in a toboggan and Marilyn and Tessa began pulling them around the back yard, inside the pool area where Dum-Dum could be turned loose inside the fence. This worked for about fifteen minutes before they started getting chilly and fussy. In the meantime, Charlie and Bucky disappeared up the hill with their sleds. We took the little ones inside and left the boys to their own devices. They'd come in sooner or later.
They did. Mid-morning we saw them from the breakfast nook, looking out through the patio door as we sat there sipping hot chocolate. Bucky was half supporting Charlie, who seemed to be holding his arm and limping. I looked over at Marilyn, who was shoveling rice gruel into Holly and Molly, and asked, "Now what have those two gotten into?"
She glanced out the window and said, "Don't know, but they're your problem. I'm in charge of girls. You're in charge of boys, remember?"
I grunted in acknowledgement of our pre-baby agreement. Tessa stood up and went to the patio door and let the boys in. It was obvious that Charlie had a look a pain on his face, and was favoring his left side and cradling his left arm. "What happened?", she asked.
Charlie limped over to his mom, and Bucky answered, "We crashed."
"You crashed?", asked his father.
"On the ski jump.", he answered, nodding happily.
"What ski jump?", I asked. As soon as the words were out of my mouth I knew they were the stupidest words I had ever said. What was I thinking?! They were little boys! Of course they had a ski jump!
Bucky started talking and pointing, and I just looked over at Tusker and said, "This I got to see!"
"Me, too!"
We stood up and slipped on our boots and coats, and I grabbed the leash for Dum-Dum. Tusker and I followed Bucky out through the patio door with Dum-Dum straining at the leash, and were led down to the bottom of the hill. "We crashed here.", we were told, with Bucky pointing to a big pile of snow.
Tusker and I looked at the pile, and then at each other. "Just how did you two knuckleheads manage to do that?", asked his father.
"Well, we started up there, and then when we got here we crashed.", was the explanation, accompanied with a lot of pointing.
We continued quizzing Bucky, and then sent him back to the house. I stood there looking at everything for a moment. The plan was simple enough, if audacious, and bird-brained to the point of idiocy. The boys mounded snow up down at the bottom of the hill, down near a small bump close to Mount Carmel Road. Then the intrepid pair grabbed their toboggan and headed up the hill, all the way to the tree line about three hundred feet uphill from the house. The plan was that they would start as far up the hill as they could, race down the snowy slope, hit the ski jump, and be launched into the air. At that point, airborne, they would sail over the drainage ditch, over the fence, over Mount Carmel Road, and finally come down for a gentle landing in John Caples' cornfield, a distance I conservatively estimated at well over one hundred feet.
It was impossible, of course. The slope was too gentle, the jump was too shallow, the distance was too great. Evel Knievel with jets up his ass couldn't have made that jump! Instead, the boys had scooted down the slope, blown through the pile of snow, and tumbled ass over teakettle into the ditch, where they finally fetched up against the fence.