After Buck retired from the Coast Guard, he worked sporadically logging with Johnnie and Vake, working as a handyman at Diamond Lake Resort, but basically enjoyed retirement. Similarly, Sylvia was, for a while, a “news hen” for the Siuslaw News in Florence, and taught needlework through the Grange, but they didn’t pursue jobs.
During the early 1950s, they were living at Bridge, OR, in a big old farmhouse where bats would invade the upstairs bedroom when the windows were open. Buck discovered that despite their sonar navigation, he could knock them down with a tennis racket. There were also beaver in the creek next to the house, and one night the beavers reduced their big old plum tree to nothing but a pile of small twigs.
Their daughter Audrey won a duckling at a carnival, and brought it home. Buck and Sylvia left it outside over night on a porch, thinking that the cat would dispatch it. Instead, the duckling cuddled up to the cat and her kittens. Sylvia told how every day, Buck would walk down the long driveway to check the mailbox, and all the cats and one duck would trail after him. The duck was slower than the cats, and would seem distracted when it got to the puddle half way down the drive, but it never seemed sure what to do with water. It thought it was a cat.
Their dog, Pooh Dog, pulled carrots out of the garden and rolled them in wet grass to clean them before eating them. The dog was such a member of the family that when somebody asked Audrey about her ancestry, she explained that she was part Finnish, and part cocker spaniel.
Buck paid endless attention to his nieces and nephews, and told them tall tales: “Have you ever hear of the side-hill dodger? It has lived on the hills for so long that its legs have evolved to be longer on the left side than on the right for running clockwise around the hill, but you have to watch out: During breeding season, they gets turned around, so they tumble down hill, and you have to dodge them.”
“That’s just college students,” Vake commented to Dean, who was a student at the time.
Or, “Do you know why lambs get their tails bobbed? It’s because otherwise, their tails drag in the mud, and get so heavy that they pull the lambs’ skin back like a tight pony tail. It pulls their eyes open, and they die from lack of sleep.”
Buck could recite the sing-song verses his generation was raised with, like the poems of Robert Service, including “The Cremation of Dan McGee: “Oh, the Northern Lights have seen strange sights, but the strangest they ever did see, was there on the marge of Lake LaFarge, where they cremated Dan McGehee….”
Buck showed children how to steam boards to bend them, to shape the prow of a row boat, and how to braid cords to make square braids or round ones, and how to whip up a batch of buckwheat pancakes for breakfast. His rowboat was always ready for a kid to take out on to Siltcoos Lake for some bait fishing, and he taught them how to filet the scrap fish, like the perches, crappies and bluegill.
Buck also loved to tell about the children’s exploits: How, when Johnnie and Evelyn were trying to raise turkeys, he caught Dean dragging a double-bladed ax that was too heavy for him to lift. A turkey had assaulted him, and Dean was going to kill it. And Buck’s favorite story: Dean pulled open the pocket of his trousers to show Buck a handful of nightcrawlers. “Look Buck, erms!”
Aunt Sylvia’s skill at crafts lay particularly in needlework. She told me once that when she was hospitalized for tuberculosis, she sewed her daughter Audrey a dress, entirely by hand. I thought that a machine stitched dress would be stronger, but she argued that a hand-made dress would be better. She also knew how to tat. Tatting is a rarely-seen way of making lace by hand by catching tiny, regular loops in a single thread, one loop, one thread thickness at a time, building up a design until a piece is large enough to edge a handkerchief or even cover a table. She was meticulous in her sewing by machine, too, and gave Sandy and me instructions: “Always check the bobbin thread before you start a long seam; you don’t want to have a new thread start in the middle of the seam. At the ends of a seam, you take precisely one stitch backwards and one stitch forward again to lock the threads. Pull the threads to the wrong side before you clip them off.” Sylvia had a thick stack of prize-winners’ ribbons from county fairs that she won with her needlework.
“Just don’t wear out your fabric tearing out the stitching and trying to make it perfect,” Milly countered. There was always some tension between the two of them. “She always needs somebody to be mad at,” Milly complained; but then Sandy once made the same observation about Milly.
Unfortunately, a rift came. Perhaps in part because she smoked like a dragon, Sylvia stayed slim “And she’s always smoothing herself down,” Milly complained. Milly’s girlhood shapely figured had evolved into a little round belly on thin legs. Sylvia made Milly a set of pajamas, but let the waist out so far that the bottoms would have fit Santa Claus. After that, Milly refused to open any package Sylvia gave her. One gift remained wrapped, displayed on top of the piano in the living room for months, serving as a daily irritant. Finally, Sylvia directed Milly to make a birthday dinner for Eli; Sylvia would make the cake. Milly refused. “I have to take the kids to Eugene for orthodontics that day,” she explained. When Sylvia arrived with the cake, Milly sent her away. Sylvia wrote a letter to Vake that he folded back into its envelope and put away in a dresser drawer. “She’s always been high strung” is all he would say. But there were no more visits back and forth.
Eventually Buck and Sylvia sold their little cabin on Siltcoos Lake and moved to a modest residential area in Eugene, “To be close to their grandchildren,” they said. We heard that in her later years, Sylvia developed cataracts, but surgery to treat them was not successful, but I never heard more about either of them.
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