Looking back with Lot's Wife

So we’re going on vacation. Heck, this must be like our third vacation…in the thirty years we’ve been married. No, we don’t seem to vacate a lot, but now we’re going to Mexico to spend a week in a beautiful house on the beach that my sister owns. We’re going to shop, eat, talk swim, and relax. I’m going to do that. He’s probably going to read all the church manuals and get months ahead in Sunday School. He will produce a succession of deep sighs as we wander through cute stores that sell pottery and glassware and ceramic animals painted bright colors. He’ll like wandering along the beach for about a half hour, and then he’ll start wondering if we’re there yet. Do you ever wonder what would happen if you could change your spouse into exactly what you wanted him to be? It would have to be at least five different guys. I’d want a guy who was friendly, unless he was too social and spent every night with his buddies watching sports. I’d also want that guy w...

Last weekend was my granddaughter’s modern dance recital up in Salt Lake . I don’t think I’ve laughed that hard in years. Kids galloping around for an hour and fifteen minutes looking tense and lost? What’s not to love? I’m so glad it was free! I wish you could have been there. Arms waving, the ever-popular “jewel-tone” outfits, the serious inward looks of people trying to stay in line. The good news is that there didn’t seem to be any relationship to the rhythm of the music, making the experience just that much more free floating. My granddaughter’s group was killer cute naturally. Picture thirty little girls running around in circles dressed like fireflies. They were in red and black with these kind of medieval looking wing things on their backs. The highlight was the hand waving, slapping the floor, clapping part. We were all there with her. It’s recital season. This is the chance for all of us to pay back our parents for the years they spent watching us as trees in...

Everywhere you turn lately, you see someone with an extroverted belly button sticking out from a stretched-to-the-limit t-shirt. What is it with the baby boom lately? Haven’t you noticed? Pregnant women are cropping up everywhere. Pregnant is the new black. It’s cool to be preggers. And more people seem to be getting up there in the multiples: three, four, five, they’re just popping those little suckers out. I’m waiting for my neighbor’s baby to come and I’ve gotten so caught up in the process. I can see I’m a little whacked, but it’s like waiting for a jack-in-the-box to go “POP goes the weasel.” I can hardly wait to see what’s in there. (It’s a boy, but what KIND of boy!) Of course there are the usual round of people who shouldn’t be pregnant because they’re too young, or too unmarried. But even then there’s something magical about waiting for a new arrival. The excitement of wondering what they’re going to be like: stubborn and energetic, or placid and easily amus...

I got on the trampoline with my six-year old granddaughter the other day. I just had my knee scoped so I had high hopes for a mysterious renewal of my athletic abilities. I can still feel my body jumping on a tramp, the swoop as your stomach goes up, the spring in your knees as you land. We were the first in our neighborhood to get a trampoline and my parents sent out notices to parents for blocks around that children who jumped at our house had to have a signed permission slip. It was like we’d set-up a high wire circus rig. My sister Mary was really good, due to her advanced sense of daring. She could do both front and back flips whereas I never got up enough nerve to do more than have a “seat war,” aggressively sitting and standing in competition until one of us gave up in sheer desperation, just to make it stop. She could jump in the air and land on her back without worrying about the implications of a broken neck. Even at twelve I was concerned with every disastrous e...

Green acres is the place for me, Farm livin’ is the life for me! So a couple of years ago my sister and I inherited a little money from my dad and she and her husband went in with some friends and built a house in Mexico a half block from the beach. We just bought an alfalfa field outside of Duchesne. My husband is over the moon. I’m available, on this side of the moon, but still happy for him. After all, he’s given me thirty years of paychecks with nary a boo, so it’s his turn. And I knew when I married him he was a workaholic. I kind of like that he’s that way, it keeps him busy and out of my hair. This is going to mean spending summer Saturdays for the rest of my life up in Salt Lake shopping with my daughter, not the worst news I’ve ever had. But man! Do I ever envy him his joy in this field! Today, by a fluke, he was home for lunch and so I made him sausage and eggs and toast, a favorite, and as he was mopping up his plate I said, “You happy?” Meaning...

Been There, Done That Writing for the Provo Herald is a bit different than writing for the Springville Herald because I knew a lot of the people who read my column and I got regular feedback. I’m a sixty-something woman married to a seventy-something man who still works full time as a contractor and is planning to buy some land and work on the weekends as a farmer. Our ages are several years apart, but we’ll probably both die at the same time only I’ll be in my eighties and he’ll be playing around with the nineties. We can probably have my funeral and his 100 th birthday party on the same day. Or at least save the balloons from one to use for the other. I think about the things people my age think about, and one of those subjects is death. It’s not that I’m necessarily worried about it or sad, it’s more like I realize that if I’ve always wanted to learn French or hike the Great Wall of China, I probably better get on it because who knows what my memory or my or my ...