One Woman's Story--the First 65 Years

When I was a second year teacher at Bear Lake High School, I received a card in my mailbox which I might have thrown out as junk mail, but instead I read it.  It asked one simple question:  "Do you like to travel?"  At the time travel was about as far away from my thoughts as dancing ballet in Lincoln Center!  I was the sole supporter for my family of four.  We were barely keeping it together and sometimes not even that.  We drove an old car which required constant propping up.  The kids were working jobs to do what they could, and we squeaked by somehow.  Nevertheless, I checked "YES", sent it back, and before long a heavily English-accented voice greeted me on my phone one night.  Julian was from Passports Travel.  We chatted, and I agreed to let him send me some materials.  About that time I casually asked a student, David Hammond, where he'd like to travel one night when we were cleaning up after a performance of a Christma...

The Sense of Place by Wallace Stegner  If you don’t know where you are, says Wendell Berry, you don’t know who you are. Berry is a writer, one of our best, who after some circling has settled on the bank of the Kentucky River, where he grew up and where his family has lived for many generations. He conducts his literary explorations inward, toward the core of what supports him physically and spiritually. He belongs to an honorable tradition, one that even in America includes some great names: Thoreau, Burroughs, Frost, Faulkner, Steinbeck – lovers of known earth, known weathers, and known neighbors both human and nonhuman. He calls himself a “placed” person. But if every American is several people, and one of them is or would like to be a placed person, another is the opposite, the displaced person, cousin not to Thoreau but to Daniel Boone, dreamer not of Walden Ponds but of far horizons, traveler not in Concord but in wild unsettled places, explorer not inward but outward. Adv...

Jerry and I spent three years of our life teaching English to Chinese university students as part of BYU China Teachers. Our adventures were many and colorful.  We were greatly changed and so so privileged to know and love so many--both Chinese and our fellow American teachers.  This experience doesn't deserve just a chapter.  It deserves a book.  So I will save the stories and my best pictures for that book. (Our BYU China Teachers training group--BYU August 2014) (Good friends Bill and Alice--Chengdu) (camel riding on the Silk Road, Western China) (posing with Tibetan Mastiffs in the Himalayan Mountains of Tibet)  (with some manner of white mammal in Harbin) (on the Li River near Guilin, China) (Buddhist shrines in Lhasa, Tibet) (pre-school students we taught weekly in our apartment in Chengdu) (at a festival in Tianjin, China) (this outstanding gourd teapot made by...

( from two separate bloposts) Here Are Twenty Things That May Surprise You About Me Even If You Think You Know Me:  1. I usually read between 15 and 20 books at a time.   2. I  have NOT read past the third Harry Potter book--go ahead, kick me.  3. I have lost a toenail every summer for the last 6 years due to hiking extravaganza gone wild.  4. I don't drink milk.  5. I've only been REALLY lost once.  6. I feel about 16 inside. The graying temples and neck thing REALLY throw me off!  7. I have a recurring dream and wouldn't you like to know what it is????  8. I have been in love 6 times.  9. Once I slammed my glasses down into the bathtub because I was mad. Then I told my mom they "fell off my nose." Do you think they have internet in heaven so I can finally settle this with my mom?  10. Once I backed our Subaru into a tree but I told my husband, "Wow, I don't know WHERE that dent came from."  11. I have never...

Rings 'n Things Another year and still not wed-- Another year and still not dead. And if you're still not wed or dead, THEN WAIT! There's something to be said For this little in-between thing This waiting for a ring thing This waiting for the mother in you to be kind of thing thing! When you're almost there to that time when you could  be-- Holding hands, holding a baby, or holding a plain old B.A. degree, Or better still, why not holding all three? With a nice man to hold, thrown in for good measure, As just a little something on the side for you to treasure! "Sounds great!" you say, "But where can I find him? I've hunted and waited and pleaded and waited and anticipated and waited and waited and waited For something to be-- But that BE just won't be-- So, here I am not wed. Here I am not dead!" And what's wrong with that I ask you now? Isn't there something to be said for this thing that we...