Looking back with Lot's Wife

Internet travel: it’s inexpensive, you never have to sit in a middle seat, and, your clothes never wrinkle. Hotel sites in Bermuda make me salivate. My favorites are the ones where a desk clerk takes a video camera for a 360: there’s the ocean, pause, the pool surrounded by the plastic deck chairs you can’t get out of, pause, the double-stacked pastel bungalows waiting for you, pause, the thatched restaurant, with the cute bartender smiling, waiting for my drink order. “Ze Diet Coke, with ze limon and ze lime? We have nevare zeen zis drink!” They’re French. Why not spend an hour visiting rental villas in Tuscany? They’re so cute and so old and so stone-wall-rustic. If you lived there, you’d have long legs and great hair and naturally glossed lips all the time. And, wow, you can’t be too careful about the rooms: antiques? hard wood floors? One time, I visited, in a cyber way, this hotel in Mexico that had all these great Aztec artifacts. Boy, it was so cool. You could be ...

I love living in Utah. As a convert to the LDS Church, I feel “blessed with every fiber of my being” to be here. Really and Truly. HOWEVER, there are things, frankly, that I sometimes miss about Colorado and not being a Mormon and one of those is drinking. It’s not that I actually drank all that much before the great baptism. I have never been a person who likes to spend money on liquids. I don’t like Look-aid, or chamomile tea, or Postum for that reason. Too much work, too much money. I have always thought that water was free and on tap so why bother? But there is a whole aesthetic behind drinking with my family that I miss. First, I have to say that the number of alcoholics in out Irish Catholic family is, of course, embarrassingly high. We could probably fill two or three AA meetings a week, in our own, with no outside help. There are few among us who have not been 12-steppers at one time or another. I once took a friend, LDS, to check into a dry-out facility and they took her famil...

This morning my daughter called me at 7:45 to tell me to turn on the news. I watched as the World Trade Center collapsed and wondered what the people on those airplanes felt as they flew toward it. My friends Norris called, as I knew she would, fearful for herself and her family. My college-aged sons stayed glued to the TV, only leaving for classes or jobs. I was their age when President Kennedy was assassinated. I remember watching ever minute of that tragedy. I know my kids must be wondering what will become of their world, what their lives will be like. I have been dealing with big changes in my life lately and it has been difficult to adjust to those changes. I moved this week from a volunteer job with people that I dearly loved to another job. I miss the people I won’t be seeing anymore so much that I can’t even think about them without wanting to race back to them and the comfortable routine of being with them each Friday. Then, one of our sons moved home and is taking a semester...

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 ...

You and the little man have planned your first vacation alone in the entire 35 years of your marriage. You will not be visiting your old Aunt Suzie because she needs John to fix her screens; you’re not taking a single kid or grandkid and you’re leaving the dog. No Disneyland for you—you’re going straight to Hawaii and laying your fat little body on the beach in a full coverage suit from Dahle’s and hoping like heck that you don’t see anyone from Springville for an entire 10 days! Suddenly, the day before you leave, the water main breaks in the front yard and your grass is now a rice paddy and you’re waiting for the water police to come by and take you to jail. The dog gets run over by the ice cream truck and the vet wants $600 just to look at his bloody back leg and your daughter calls and says she wants to move back home because she and Whatzhisname are thinking about an open marriage and maybe she just wants a divorce. Is this a sign? Are you just not supposed to go on this trip? Is ...

You know the story of the Princess and the Pea? The queen wants to find a true princess for her adorable son so she puts a pea under a stack of 20 mattresses and invites all the most beautiful young ladies to come spend the night at their house—sort of like President Clinton did—but non of them discovered the pea. One cold, dark rainy night a bedraggled young woman comes to the door and begs a room and the queen, completely worn out from houseguests, says, “Oh just let here stay in the Pea Room.” The next morning the young woman comes down to breakfast and she’s exhausted. “I tossed all night long, madam. There were boulders in that mattress!” And the queen knew that she had found the true princess and that her son would have someone who whould nag him to death after she was gone. Is this a houseguest, or what? In our little haven away from the world, to continue the fairy tale theme, there are two people the mommy and the daddy, better known as, respectively, the happy cheerful, lovin...

Will We? My tombstone will say: HERE LIES OUR BELOVED MOTHER IN HER LAST REST ROOM. Does no one realize that I “go” so often to get away from everyone? That my kidneys have been trained to a hair-trigger sensitivity so that I can lock a door somewhere and not feel guilty? I recently read that the great thing about being a parent is that you find that you can be hated for long periods of time and not be bothered. Think of what a character builder that is! I have just stopped defending myself as a parent. I think the most effective thing to say when someone tells me what a terrible parent I am is, “Absolutely. You are absolutely right. You have no idea how completely right you are.” However, we are now entering into the quasi-empty nest years. The years when they go, then come back, then go. Clay and I veer back and forth between exultant freedom and this illusion that we’re still young if we have kids at home. We’ve lived so long that we’ve now become the heroes of the stories of what w...