The Wild Bunch

For a change, I'm not talking about animals.  Mentioning cooking yesterday made me start reminiscing about a group of friends from back in the day that we called The Wild Bunch.  We had so much fun together, and, boy, I really did some cooking then.  There were three couples and Deb (this was pre-Craig).  Some or all were at our house for dinner nearly every weekend.  We went to every event in the valley:  the Dixon Lamb Fair, the Courtland Pear Fair, every Highland games we could find, and Deb and I would go to the Isleton Crawdad Festival.  The day after Thanksgiving, some of us would go a way down the road and pick out our Christmas trees, to be cut later.  It was tradition we come back to our house for Irish coffee after these outings.  We went camping together, almost always in the winter to avoid the crowds.  We played poker and innumerable board games.  One year I made a ton of Christmas sugar cookies and we all decorated them.  (The guys got carried away and there were some pretty risque Santas.)  We threw Halloween parties where everyone came in very inventive costumes.  You should have seen Deb as The Killer Clown From Outer Space, armed with a potato masher!  It was at one of these parties that Clay came into our lives.  One New Year's the holiday fell in the middle of the week and everyone was tired.  It didn't stop us from having a party, but along about 10 o'clock, we decided that there could be too much of a good thing.  I set the kitchen timer for ten minutes, we chanted down the time and when the timer dinged we toasted the new year and gave kisses all around.  It was so much fun, I set the timer again and we did a repeat.

Moving up here did not break up The Wild Bunch.  The parties were simply extended to three and four days.  It was nothing to have fifteen or twenty people (family members included) sleeping upstairs and down, and out in the travel trailer we had then.  I would cook breakfast and dinner for this crowd, lunch was catch as catch can.  Ushering in the Millennium was an elaborate, fancy-dress affair and included a time capsule buried out in the yard on New Year's Day.  Craig had joined the group by then (insert happy face here).  Gosh, we had some good times.

Amongst all this reverie, I actually got some neglected chores done yesterday.  It was good to spend time with old friends, if only in memory.  I miss The Wild Bunch.