Looking back with Lot's Wife

These are the things a spouse must go through to become part of a family. You have to hear the family stories enough that they become your stories—so that your family stories become so mixed together that you sometimes get them confused. “Was that my aunt of yours that scared off the bear?” Sunday my husband and I escaped, without kids, to Trout Creek, a small stream that empties into Strawberry Reservoir. My gosh, the feelings of guilt that swept over us, taking off in the middle of a day to spend six hours alone. It was pretty dang delicious. We’ve been working way too hard this summer. Too much responsibility was making this Jack and Jill embittered old cronies. But this is our annual trek. Sometimes we don’t make it until late into autumn but we struggle to be there, to go over the history. This is where “our family” moved in the thirties and cut timber and milled lumber. In the early years of our marriage, I hated this trip to Trout Creek because of the stories: his mother making ...

Viva Las Vegas? #1 January 8, 1992 Well, I’ve lost my virginity—after two husbands and five kids. I’ve been to see the fat lady as they used to say at the old time carnivals. In fact, there were about a million fat ladies. We’ve been to Las Vegas for the first time. Impossible as it may seem, we’ve gotten to be this old and this experienced without ever partaking of this sublime experience. I hope it never comes back. We went to Las Vegas expecting to see SIN in all its many guises. I expected to be beguiled by evils, so to speak. At the very least, I expected drunks in the streets and a carnival atmosphere. No one prepared me for hoards of seriously intent quarter pushers, people with the deep expressions of chairmen of the board facing hostile takeovers. No one laughs while gambling. It’s do or die, guns along the Mohawk with these people. I didn’t except everybody to be middle aged. The women in matching hot pink sweatsuits with bejeweled and sequined tops, the men in logo-bedecked ...