Looking back with Lot's Wife

Today I’m looking out my window (which really needs to be cleaned) at tah, dah, Spring! I can see the first baby leaves on the bushes peeking out of their bark shells, still brown but looking eager. The worn out winter plants, fragile and ready to be cut down to make way for petunias and lavender. Of course, the first wet peek at my good old daffodils and hopefully, the new tulips I planted last year, forty bulbs from Sam’s Club shoveled in in fifteen minutes at five o’clock one evening last fall. Not exactly gourmet gardening. My heart leaps thinking there’s actually going to be hope for green, for summer and bathing suits (not on me, but on leaping brown boys and round baby girls.) My puppy dog and I will be out walking away our winter fat. There will be that best of all of nature’s inventions, the spring morning with a misty chill in the air and the promise of the sun soon coming up warm and cozy. There will be rain, just enough for one more cup of cocoa, and then, that best...

One of our favorite things to buy at a senior discount is a trip to the local Chuck-A-Rama on Monday night, family night. Tragically, we go to watch the kids. So far, we at least haven’t gone at four in the afternoon. We wait until grown-up dinnertime. Five thirty. Okay, it’s a little early, but you don’t have to wait in line. Really, it’s just great to sit down and eat your cooked mixed vegetables without having to scream at anyone. So we’re alone, who cares? We love each other. We’re interesting even without kids. It’s just that we have nothing else to talk about but our kids. We actually haven’t had a life for the last forty years that didn’t involve our kids. But, hey, so what? We can watch. We had that glazed smile dieters have at a bakery: “No thanks, we don’t want any.” But at the same time, there’s a little bit of longing there. Otherwise we’d go to a restaurant in Utah County where there weren’t so many kids (except no one has ever discovered that place.) The ...

If I were to tell you about my volunteer career, it might make you give up entirely on the idea of volunteering. But you and your charming self are really needed in the volunteer community. So I feel the need to share my thoughts here, even though there are probably hundreds of other folks who do a better job. However, you might be frightened off by their inspiring stories whereas, with me, I just do a so-so job, so you can feel really good about your chances. So far, they haven’t kicked me out of any program, which says a lot about the general low hopes organizations have for free help. Many of us deal with volunteers. Generally they come in two varieties: those who don’t show up, and those who do show up but want to take over. There is a third variety, those who have a high tolerance for making idiots of themselves and are willing to try again and again in the face of inevitable failure which comes from a lack of skill and the accompanying lack of training. I say inevitable becau...

I have always loved the idea of spontaneous combustion. It’s just always seemed possible to me in my fevered imagination. Intellectually I know we’re supposed to scorn those dolts in the Middle Ages who thought it was possible to hatch a patch of maggots from a pile of garbage, but there’s this disconnect somewhere in my brain that thinks…I don’t know what I think but it’s along the lines of understanding that Dumbo can fly and mice can make Cinderella a dress. If you can go to Narnia through a wardrobe, why not grow maggots at home in your rags? Or mice in your trash. I guess the reason we believe in magic is it appeals to the lazy houseboy in all of us. Who has not looked at their living room and thought about how easy it would be to throw up pretty, well-shaped upper arms and wave them around and have all the books go back in their bookcase and the dust swirl up in a whirlwind and dive by itself into the trash can? And mostly it’s pretty people who do magic. It’s never the fat ...

My grandson stood at the top of the snow basin, dropped his sled, and watched it slide to the bottom . “Go on, Alex, just get on and go down.” “No,” he said, “I just like dropping it down.” Of course, no wonder. He’s from California and has maybe been sledding twice in his short, four-year-old life and he was scared. Frankly. It was eight at night and we were sledding under a full moon with my daughter and her daughter. It was late because by the time their plane landed and I finally found snow pants and boots and gloves for everyone and after we had eaten dinner, night had definitely come to the Salt Lake City park system. Over and over Alex dropped the sled, comfortably clinging to his assertion that he just wanted to watch his sled go down, more than he wanted to slide down. Over and over he watched it solemnly as it bounced over the bumps and skittered over icy spots. I admired his tenacity. His younger cousin, a girl, was whipping down the slope, on her saucer, whooping and l...

Diane teaches second grade and each and every one of the little munchkins she spends her days with have all gone nuts with what she calls “Christmas-ness.” One of the symptoms of Christmas-ness, according to her, is rolling around on the floor in the aisles between desks. “Courtney, what ARE you doing?” she asked a tiny twirler last week. The answer, says Diane, is that there is no answer; it’s just Christmas-ness. Welcome to my world, Courtney. Christmas-ness in its adult form shows up at first when the victim begins to have grandiose ideas of Christmas past. This year’s celebration, she thinks, will be the one everybody will always remember, filled to overflowing with warmth and sugar cookies and holly and pine. Oh, if I could have just stopped then when I didn’t have all the boxes of decorations out on the living room floor shedding dust from the basement, where they live the rest of the year. (Have you noticed, this is what every good girl says after she gets in trouble, “If w...

There were these two enormous guys at the Grand Junction IHOP this morning who had sleeve tattoos, those tattoos that cover your arms. They were facinating, and best of all, people were staring at them. Like my husband's Uncle Ivan used to say: "Marry a fat woman and you can be warm in the winter, have shade in the summer, and if she has tattoos, you can see the movin' pictures." I was grateful they were there because I was with my handicapped son, Stephen, and we are usually the first thing that people stare at. Stephen's looks a little funny: one eye is a lot smaller than the other and he sort of gimps along because it gives him a firmer grip on the road to have one leg bent if he falls. He recognizes me because I have "the smell." Our family smells like caramel sauce that's been in the fridge for a while. I also wear the same perfume, White Shoulders, that I wore when he was little and lived at home. He moved to Grand Junction in 1972 to live...