Looking back with Lot's Wife

Cole and I went shopping for his birthday last week.  It was loads of fun but  I didn't really process the fact that I'll need to take everyone else for a birthday trip from now on. This is the first time I've ever seen someone lick their nugget sauce packet completely clean after the nuggets were gone. Yum, yum honey mustard! This is a picture of Cole's new red hat blowing out six birthday candles. The party was at Ben and Angie's new house which they managed to move in on Ben's birthday, July 12th. Over twenty people from their old ward helped them move.  They must have been really glad to see them off.  This "fit for a king" media center was Ben's high point but the rounded arches over the doors, the chair rail, and the thousand other details are amazing too.  Is this the cutest picture ever?  Wendall's band played at a "battle of the bands" at the Brown Bros. Performing Arts Center in Spanish Fork las...

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 who, when I sa...

I hit my head last week walking the dog.   I tripped in the dark on a piece of upheaved sidewalk that was in the shadow of a tree.  I was looking in people's windows ,watching them cook dinner, sit around the kitchen table with family. I love that.  All the insides look so warm and homey at night with the yellow light shining out into the dark.  It's really surprising how many people leave their curtains open! I feel like I need to explain that this accident was not specifically age related. I feel like there’s a subtext to anything that happens to me now that I'm in my sixties.     Did I temporarily loose consciousness?    Did my osteoporotic bones collapse under me?   “Oh, no!    I didn’t trip because I don’t see well enough!    I just wasn’t watching where I was going!” Did I forget where I was going?    If I’m that absent minded, am I ok being alone?    I need to not...

The good news is that I've realized that most of the tragedies in my life could be covered in a half hour sit-com. There's maybe one Lifetime movie for a slow week in February, but definitely no black and white documentaries or movies starring Sally Field as me looking back at epic times. This is how I wish I felt about snow! I'm not sure if this is the result of edited thinking on my part--"Oh, I really wasn't that weird"--which you could make an argument for, or just the realization that so many other lives around the world have been so much harder. What I do realize now is how much of what looked like courage was mainly a lack of awareness of possibility.  As one friend of mine, a policeman, told me once, "You don't think anything bad is going to happen to you because nothing bad has happened to you so far." Old age takes courage.  Partly because there are so many possibilities for things to go wrong when you're old.  I forgot some...

I (your name here) do solemnly promise that I will not eat another buttered dinner roll or piece of chocolate, unless it is the last piece in a box and I want to save it from being wasted; and I will keep this promise until I can fit into my high school graduation outfit, or until February 1st, whichever comes first.

Up this morning trying to think through the last five days before Christmas:  I have four gift cards to buy at the bank--Visa cards so general that you could buy anything you want except dope or crafts from farmers' markets. There are two presents to mail which I should just mail because the more I think about it, the larger it looms as a job and the later the presents are going to arrive and the guiltier I feel, which in turn makes me want to mail them even less because they're going to be late so the packages should be even bigger and better so they were worth waiting for--so I should go buy more stuff to put in the packages so they'll be even later because I just can't make myself buy anything else.  Ever again.  At least until January. I also have two presents to buy for my sister and my brother-in-law.  I gave my brother-in-law a great present last year, a shirt he put on right away and "never took off" according to my sis.  So now I can never buy him a...

This is the bull that attacked me yesterday when I was out walking in the fields west of Springville. Okay, clearly I’m still alive so I’m lying, but really, he was racing towards me, stopped only by three teeny strands of barbed wire.   I about died of a heart attack.   I didn’t even know where I was so I couldn’t call anybody to come get me.   So I did the next best thing.   I kept walking, and walking, and walking.   Those farm blocks are loooong.   Finally someone came along and picked me up and returned me safely to my car.   I was about two minutes away from it by car.   But I walked FOREVER before that. Okay, not forever.   But it felt like it.