A VISIT TO LAKE CAVANAUGH

Last weekend I flew from our County Airport (1/2 mile from work) to Seattle for a long weekend visit with family. The Charles M. Schulz Sonoma County Airport is small but fun - like air travel used to be. Horizon is the only carrier out of our airport and we can fly direct to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle. I chose to take the evening flight so I wouldn't have to take time off work. This is the flight to Portland, with connections to Seattle. I don't mind the stop in Portland because one can stretch ones legs, use regular sized bathroom facilities and get coffee.

Friday morning I got up early, considering that my sister-in-law Carolyn and I had stayed up past midnight looking at bathroom floor and counter top samples, as well as paint chips. Larry and Carolyn are about to start their last remodel project in their house - updating the bathroom and two upstairs bedrooms. The reason I had to get up early is that my Dad, 1/2 hour away, was waiting to be picked up by me and taken to Lake Cavanaugh, where my sister Carol and her husband Frank have their summer residence. Carol and I had made a date much earlier in the year for the two of us to go through some of the things saved from clearing out Mom and Dad's house prior to selling it. Mainly what we have left is photographs and recipes.

We started on the recipes but couldn't finish in one day. Our mother was amazing. Every year at Christmas time she would make her signature "buns" which are a sort of large roll, the shape of a hamburger bun. She made this from her mom's recipe for "overnight rolls." This recipe is from the time when everyone had large families and made their own bread. In fact, I can remember at my Grandmother Parmenter's house the amazing flour bin she had. It was one of those drawers that pulled out and down and was lined with metal. Mom told me it could hold 50 pounds of flour! So, Mom's buns - she would start the bread the afternoon before and generally form up 1 load of bread, which she would bake then, and somewhere between 90-115 buns which would rise overnight in the kitchen. I can still remember the smell of the yeast on Christmas morning (not to mention the smell of freshly baked rolls!) Mom would get up at 6 AM Christmas morning (and I am talking ALWAYS, until about a year before she died at age 96) and start baking the buns. Then us kids (usually I got drafted, being the youngest who hadn't learned how to get out of it) went on the "bun run" to deliver hot buns to the neighbors. This was a Christmas tradition for over 50 years at our house (I'll have to ask my older sibs sometime if they remember when it started). So, what was so amazing is that when Carol and I were going through Mom's recipes, we not only found this one, but also, on the back of the 3x5 card, in very tiny writing, her accounting of how many loaves and buns her recipe made in each year, spanning a decade! We also found other 3x5 cards with additional information, such as how many buns were delivered to whose house and what extra people they had visiting that year.

It's no wonder we couldn't finish going through Mom's recipes in one day. We had to stop many times to have tea breaks. On one break we looked out the window and saw a family of 4 deer grazing a mere few feet away. Here are two of them .

Frank's brother Milt and his wife Karoline happened to also be visiting at the time, along with Karoline's cousin Bob. Well, we were like a bunch of kids pressing their noses to the window at the first sight of snow. Everyone was calling, "look at the deer" and rushing to the windows. I took all my photos from inside, that's how close they were.

And the interesting thing was that they stuck around in the yard all day long. Good eating, I guess.

Carol and I finally made it through all the recipes, copying some for each other, deciding which ones to pass on to the nephews and nieces, and throwing away a very few, like the one on which Mom wrote "no good."

When I flew in to Santa Rosa on Sunday, the Pacific Coast Airshow was just finishing up and it was CROWDED at the airport. I did see some really cool planes like this DC 3

and this stealth plane

AND, as I was walking to the parking lot the classic car club was taking a final lap around the airport road.


What a treat! All in all it was a very satisfying and restful (though busy) weekend.

BTW, several of us in the family, all cousins, have tried to make "Mom's Buns" but they are never the same. One of these days I'll give it a go.

Audrey