Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

I learned the Hallelujah Chorus in the back seat of a two-toned blue and white ’56 or ’57 Chevy sedan on one of our many trips driving over Donner Pass in a blizzard as we headed either to or from Sacramento to Las Vegas to spend Christmas at Grandma’s house during the years my dad was stationed at Mather Air Force Base. Unable to afford a station wagon, my dad had constructed a padded bench which exactly filled the gap between the front and back seats so we kids could spread out blankets and pillows and nap in comfort. With radio reception scratchy or sometimes non-existent, we often sang our way through the miles.

Dad’s favorite was cowboy music by the Sons of the Pioneers, which is why my brother and I knew all the verses to pretty much every song they ever recorded. The appearance of snow often inspired my dad to burst into song with the Hallelujah Chorus. Both my parents were from tiny Nevada towns you have to search to find on a map, but my dad spent two years at BYU before WWII broke out. Joining what must have been an enormous musical group to a small-town farm boy, he sang with the Men’s Choir during that time before he enlisted. On long trips, he taught us every song in his college repertoire. Of course, he only knew the bass parts, so it was not until I was in high school that I learned I’d only been singing the bottom 1/4  of Handel’s immortal music—just an octave higher.

When it was my turn to head to BYU, I black-mailed my way into an audition-required chorale. I lacked any serious musical talent, but I wrote the publicity for the Music Department, so it was a wise political move to allow me a spot. It was traditional then for the Fine Arts performance groups to hold a pre-Christmas break Brown Bag concert at the Harris Fine Arts Center. With the symphony on the ground floor and several choirs of voices, bells, brass, and string ensembles lining the two stories of balconies which overlooked the main hall, each group took turns celebrating in music the Birth of the Baby in Bethlehem. For the finale, we joined together to perform the Hallelujah Chorus.

I recall standing at the railing high above the orchestra with the other members of the Women’s Choir. As the introduction began, a frail and elderly gray-haired woman slipped through the crowd and stood next to me, lifting her hand with mine to share music of the most famous anthem in Handel’s 240-paged Messiah score. All around the half dozen formal choirs, members of the audience were moving forward to join their voices with ours. When the conductor signaled us to begin, I was stunned by the power of the voice coming from the tiny woman beside me. I do not believe she ever glanced even once at the music we held together. As our voices rose, her face began to glow, wrinkles seeming to reassemble themselves into an image which–as a young person–I had never seen before: her face was etched with joy.

The music rang across the broad expanse of hall to rafters and then back again. When it ended with its final triumphal note, the air seemed to collapse from my new partner’s small frame. She smiled up at me, and then she disappeared into the clamor of several hundred students bustling to their next class or headed home for Christmas vacation. There was not time for me to even learn her name.

Over the years, I have had occasion to listen to many performances of the Hallelujah Chorus, including some in which my own children and hundreds–perhaps thousands–of high school students have participated. Without fail, like the unknown woman who sang next to me in my college days, we are each transported to an ancient field where shepherds watched their flocks and wondered at the brilliant star which lit the deep, dark night of long ago. Around us the heavens open, revealing “a multitude of heavenly host praising God, and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.’”

Hallelujah. Amen. And Amen.

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, my grandson, a college student, asked me what book I had read which changed my life? I was stymied. Which part of my life? Changed how? And does that include the books I found under my brother’s bed, hidden from our parents? Or the 60 adolescent literature books I had to read in a single semester for my English major? The six or seven large bookcases scattered around my house attest to the fact that I love books, but after a good deal of thought, I realized the books that stand out to me are those which I saw change the lives of people around me.

When I taught Junior Honors English, we used a huge American Literature survey textbook which would have qualified as a low-budget defensive weapon if a student had been wearing his backpack and was mugged in a dark alley. Its first entries were excerpts from early colonial diaries. One morning my students filed in after I had assigned them to read a piece by Massachusetts’ first governor, William Bradford. One kid was so fired up about the assignment, he started talking immediately after the tardy bell rang.

“Mrs. Voorhies, Mrs. Voorhies.” His words came pouring out, and his voice rose as he became even more excited. “You won’t believe what happened!” I encouraged him to stop and take a breath. “For generations in my family, we have had this story handed down about a kid, an indentured servant, who fell off the Mayflower in a terrible storm as it crossed the Atlantic from England. He should have died, but he grabbed a rope from a rigging which the ferocious winds had ripped apart and was hanging out into the sea over a railing. The boy was half drowned, but he managed to hold to that piece of the torn sail until one of the crew spotted him and pulled him out of the water.

“My mom had come to a dead end when she was working on our family genealogy because no one knew this boy’s name. But he’s here.” He pointed to his textbook. “Right here! Governor Bradford mentions the boy who fell overboard in his diary. I found him! My mother is so excited.”

I was excited, too. Even more so when, last summer, a member of my own extended family did a Zoom family history presentation on “The Boy Who Fell Off the Mayflower,” a children’s book suggested for use in elementary school classrooms when students study early American history. John Howland had 10 children and, according to professional genealogists, more than five MILLION living descendants today. Including me.

Late one afternoon some years later, my Advanced Placement seniors had been assigned to read Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. It is a small but difficult text which cannot be simply breezed through for the highlights of the plot, so I always braced for complaints when we began discussions about the book. That particular class was fairly small—only 15 or 16 students. They jostled one another as they came in and sat down. While I was still checking the roll, one of them leaned across his desk to a buddy and said, “What do you think the author meant in that section where . . .?”

His friend replied, but a student across the room yelled out, “No that’s not what it means at all.” A bit of a melee ensued as every student chimed in about his or her understanding of the text. I sat quietly on my stool in front of the room and let them go. For almost ninety minutes they argued back and forth, pulling out their copies of the book and reading passages in support or opposition for someone else’s ideas. Once or twice, they stopped talking and referred a question to me. I threw a question of my own back at them, and off they went again.

I don’t remember if the Heart of Darkness was part of that year’s Advanced Placement exam or not. It wasn’t really important. Unfolding before me was a group of kids who didn’t need me anymore.

As a teacher I only had three goals: one, teach students to love learning; two, give them the skills they need to learn effectively; and three, do not become an obstacle in their path to progress. That day I watched it happen. My students leaped beyond my classroom and left me behind. It’s not the books which change people’s lives. It’s the readers.

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

I don’t know much about phobias, but I’ve always wondered if it is normal for someone to be well into adulthood before she developed a serious uneasiness around high places. I distinctly remember the moment my discomfort began. We were living in Cedar City when we took Daughter #1 and Sons #s 1 and 2 on a hike up near Cedar Breaks National Monument. We stopped at the magnificent Point Supreme Overlook (10,350 ft. above sea level ) in awe of the spectacular red rock amphitheater below covered with hoodoos, spires, and alien rock formations. Distracted by the grandeur of nature, I barely glimpsed a flash from the corner of my eye and managed to grab the back of my almost three-year-old Son #2’s shirt as he tried to shimmy between bars of the railing and leap into the abyss. He was energized by the view; I never recovered from the trauma!

One afternoon when I was visiting my parents in Las Vegas, my dad was teasing me about my fear of heights and told me he’d be glad to have me lie down on the couch in his counseling office and use hypnotism to help eliminate the anxiety underlying my fear. But my phobia and I had come to a truce—I would tread lightly near the edges of anything with a severe drop-off, and my phobia promised not to morph into something worse like a fear of clowns or of large arachnids dropping from the ceiling into my mouth while I slept. (At least I hope that was our agreement.) As I declined my dad’s offer, his parting words to me were, “don’t look down”.

I thought of that the day when repelling off an 80-foot cliff was on the agenda at a youth conference where I was a Young Women’s leader. I had been teased so unmercifully by the Scout leaders that one afternoon I found myself hooking up to a rope and taking the first step over the edge of the imposing overhang. It was terrifying, but when I looked up, my neighbor was belaying the rope from which I hung. He kept his voice low and barely audible as he encouraged me. “You’re doing fine. Just keep walking down the face of the cliff. You’re not alone. We’ve got you.” And they did. When I reached the bottom, I unhooked my carabiner and cheered. Take That You Stupid Phobia! I admit I may have been overly proud of what actually turned out to be a minor accomplishment in light of what happened later–the moment when I discovered what real courage looked like.

With us was a brother and sister, both of whom had been blind from birth. The summer before, we’d taken approximately the same group of kids to East Canyon Resort for a Bike-Around-the-Lake adventure. I couldn’t imagine what riding a bike felt like to a sightless person—neither the brother nor the sister had any concept of what kept a two-wheeled vehicle rolling along. We spent considerable time trying to explain how the mechanism worked before we introduced them to our solution for their dilemma: bicycles built for two. It was a logical choice, but we adults on the front seats still had to remind the young people behind us to keep “pushing on those pedals”–which they each did for only a single rotation at a time. Then they had to be prompted again for the next rotation. Over and over for several miles. On the other hand, neither of the two whined nor gave any indication that they were annoyed with the constant re-instruction. From the unquenchable smiles on their faces, both had seemed to be genuinely enjoying the wind on their cheeks.

So, I wasn’t surprised when this very “game” boy insisted that he could do anything his buddies could do. However, as frightened as I had been, I couldn’t imagine the will it would take to step off the top of a precipice and began to fall without any inkling of how far down he had to drop or how long he would be suspended in the air? When the other teens heard that Michael was putting on a harness, they came running. With unspoken agreement, every adult in the camp who wasn’t at the top handling the ropes gathered at the bottom as if somehow by the power of our joint concern, we could help the boy do what seemed impossible to many of us. Warning him to “not look down” was absolutely meaningless in his case.

 All eyes were on him as he took the fateful step off the edge and began to walk his way down the cliff wall. At about 40 feet, his knee banged into an outcropping of rock which, of course, he couldn’t see. He panicked. He stopped abruptly, entwining his entire body around his rope which swayed gently back and forth bumping him lightly again and again against the rock. Refusing to move another inch, no amount of reassurance from the adults below made the slightest dent in the terror on his face.

Leaning over the edge to see what the problem was, the three men up top held a hurried conference about what was the best route to rescuing the boy. Then, looking up, we caught sight of one of the other scouts in the boy’s troop fastening on a harness and hooking into carabiners. Slowly, the second scout lowered himself until he was parallel with his petrified friend. Reaching out, he patted the young climber’s shoulder. “It’s all right, Michael,” he said. “I’m here. You’re not alone. Just breathe, and we’ll go down together.”

As we watched, the sightless boy turned in the direction of his friend’s voice. He clutched the hand on his shoulder. We could see him take several deep breaths and begin to visibly relax his muscles until he was hanging limply on the rope. Then we heard the sounds of his friend quietly whispering words of support and reassurance: “take a step left; slide your hands along the rope; careful of the rock near your head,” and they began to move closer and closer to the safety of the ground.

When they touched solid earth together, every adult in the circle surrounding them–including me–wiped surreptitious dampness from our eyes. Whoops and cheers erupted from above. He did it!!!! Michael did it!! The two boys high-fived and then threw their arms around each other, dancing as they clung together.

All of us learned something that day which had not been on the Youth Conference agenda, but which has proven to be an invaluable, ongoing lesson. Because Life regularly presents each of us with challenges with which we often lack even the slightest the experience to confront, a good friend on the other end of our rope makes a successful outcome far more likely.

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

I’ve long been a fan of quilts, not only because they are a cozy companion for Utah winters, but because they are one of the few art forms which has been available to women for centuries—we were making blankets for our families anyway; why not create something unique and beautiful at the same time? I, along with many friends and extended family members, have spent the weekend at the Panguitch Quilt Walk or visited the Springville Art Museum Annual Quilt Show.

So when the Family and Consumer Sciences Department at my high school bought a commercial quilting machine, I was delighted. Not because I had a quilt top which needed finishing, but because I knew that hundreds of my of students over the next few years would find great joy in designing and creating something both beautiful and useful. Sadly, I did not realize I would also come to understand that, as in all forms of art, what is visible to the eye might also conceal the tragic story of its creator.

One sunny Friday afternoon in the spring, I had a student in my Concurrent Enrollment English class–a course which provided students both high school and college credit simultaneously—come beaming into my room carrying a large bag. She was an attractive girl who earned excellent grades. “Mrs. Voorhies,” she said. “Look what I just finished.” She unfolded a magnificent queen-sized quilt which she had been working on all semester. We spread it across four desks so everyone in the class could appreciate the intricate patterns she had spent hours piecing together and then turning into a quilt she could use for many years. I was astounded. This was no amateur quilt; it was, without a doubt, the work of a talented artist. Even the boys in the class (who were notoriously unimpressed by girl stuff) were sincerely complimentary.

The very next Monday morning, a vice principal sought me out during my conference period. On Saturday, the day after she’d shown me her stunning quilt, my student–who had been so justifiably proud of her exceptional work–was dead. She and two of her friends had been partying together. They’d driven up into the hills above Bountiful and spent what must have been several hours getting high. My student overdosed and stopped breathing. Her friends panicked. They argued about whether or not to rush her to an emergency room? But their rational thinking was buried under their drug-induced terror of being discovered. So instead, they rolled this young woman out of their car and dumped her into a ravine where she died alone and without help. Once they were calmer, they just drove home.

The vice-principal asked if I would attend her funeral on behalf of the administration—perhaps because I had known the horror of losing a child to drugs? Or maybe I was just the teacher who seemed to know this student best? I have no idea. After the funeral, I walked across the lawn of the cemetery with the other mourners. I remember the mother had on a severe black dress with some kind of white collar at the throat. Quietly, I introduced myself, expressing my sorrow at her loss. This mother had had no idea her daughter was involved in drugs. She kept saying over and over, “How did this happen? How could this happen?” Her pain was so visible, I could hardly bear it. I knew from experience that years in the future, this mother would still be unexpectedly blind-sided on occasion by the power of that grief.

I grieved for her child, too. A young person so vital and talented and competent. And her child was not the only one who lost a future. My student’s friends lost theirs. The boy and the girl who had so callously tried to protect themselves by discarding her body as if she were garbage were convicted of manslaughter and still may be in jail?

Yesterday I took a baby quilt–which I have spent the last several months stitching—over to my son’s home for his newborn son. I’ve made dozens of these little quilts through the last several years. Everyone goes with a prayer that this baby will have a long and fruitful life. But it’s a wise parent who doesn’t wait till tomorrow to say, “I love you”. Just as quilts are often preserved in a family for generations, most children become adults and grow old.  A few are not so fortunate.

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

Saturday I heard Utah’s First Lady Abby Cox identify ‘empathy’ as one of the core principles behind her new initiative to create and support a program which provides unified sport competitions in Utah schools. I’d never heard of ‘adapted sports’, but I recognized their value instantly. It’s a pairing of volunteers from across a school’s student body with local students with disabilities. The partners learn to work together so that every child who wishes to do so can compete on the field or court instead of just watching from the sidelines. One of the goals of this budding program is to build empathy for one another’s strengths and challenges.

I was reminded of that when Son #6 told me recently that my twin granddaughters had been the target of some unfortunate bullying at school. This son and his wife adopted the girls as newborns. They were chubby little babies with laughter so infectious that people would stop on the street to listen to them. But they don’t look quite like most of the other children in the neighborhood. Many of their peers had had limited experience with classmates whose appearance wasn’t exactly like their own. And those children could be cruel. Son #6 and his wife have worked tirelessly with educators helping my grandchildren traverse what might have become treacherous waters without intervention.

I know exactly how those beloved little girls feel. I was six weeks or eight weeks into my ninth grade year when my dad was transferred to an Air Force base on the shores of Lake Michigan. Suddenly I went from a school in Detroit seven stories tall housing 5,000 students to a tiny town whose high school had only 300 students total in grades nine through twelve—virtually all of whom had known each other since birth. Our base housing almost always had a couple dozen of we teen-aged “military brats” who rotated through the public school in this rural community, and while their parents relished the increased income a military base provided to the area, the local teenagers ostracized us and left us mostly to flounder around socially for a couple of years until our dads got sent to a new assignment somewhere else.

Being the newest “new girl” was painful for me. I wasn’t an athlete; I didn’t sing. I didn’t know any of the local traditions, and I generally got the best grades in the class, so I was not a magnet for popularity. In those days all students were required to dress in a prescribed uniform for PE. Our locker room was filled with row after row of cubbies separated by benches which ran along the center between the racks. One afternoon I was late getting out of my last class—gym. (The image of that day is so clear in my mind, I can see the slant of the winter sunlight through the bank of high windows above me.) As far as I could tell, I was the only student left in the locker room. All around me was deadly quiet.

Seated on a bench, I was changing my shoes when I heard a group of voices float toward me from the next bank of lockers. There were apparently several girls chattering away. I ignored them until I realized they were talking about me. And they were not nice. After all these years, I still hear them making fun of the “new” girl. One of them ridiculed my religious beliefs; another called me a derogatory slur which I won’t repeat. Stung, I started to cry, but I bit my lip instead because I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of realizing I was there. I grabbed my shoes and tip-toed in bare feet out into the hall.

It was years before I realized those “mean” girls who had so traumatized me had no idea that I had spent my life moving from place to place, uprooting friendships, having to navigate unknown cities, different schools, and often vastly different curriculums. They couldn’t have known how lonely I sometimes was, or how I wished I could be part of a group of kids who knew each other so well, they didn’t have to explain their jokes. I was the outsider, and they had no need at all to let me in. Now, of course, I understand that they had their own insecurities and uncertainties to deal with. They were, after all, just kids.

Each of us has a back story hidden from casual view—including my young granddaughters and the students with disabilities whom I watched on the Rio Tinto playing field last weekend. First Lady Cox may be on to something. Give students who seem to have little in common a chance to practice and play together–what happens? Students discover a shared love of sport. Social boundaries disappear. While they’re at it, they might be surprised to find value in one another’s stories. In the end, empathy may, indeed, emerge as a balm for society’s current wide-reaching plagues of the heart.

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

For a number of years one of my closest friends was also my Visiting Teaching (the forerunner of Ministering) partner. She was short; I was tall. She had street smarts; I had a college degree. She had freckles on a face that was always laughing; I was solemn and far more reserved. Plus, she was feisty, funny, and had a gift for shrugging off the challenges in life she could do nothing about—a refreshing change from my anxiety-ridden younger self.

We took turns being pregnant. Before the days of casual ultra-sounds, every new baby was a surprise. With her five little girls in a row at home, I will never forget the morning she called me from the delivery room at the hospital where she had just given birth to her sixth baby. “It’s a boy,” she announced. I laughed hysterically. She loved practical jokes, and it was April Fool’s Day. “No, really it’s a boy!” She had to bring the baby home and take off his diaper before I believed her.

Somehow she managed to drag me into adventures I never expected–like the time we were traveling by the local cemetery. She jerked the wheel of her van to a curb next to a six foot high pile of dead potted flowers which the maintenance crew had cleared from grave sites a couple of weeks after Memorial Day and were now stacked for a green waste collection. “Let’s take some,” she yelled over her shoulder as she climbed out of the van.

“We can’t do that. It’s theft.”

“They’re dead,” she pointed out and loaded a dozen pots behind the back seat. When we got home, she dug holes and stuck the dirt covered roots in the ground of first her front flower bed and then mine. Mums sprung up the next fall and bloomed for years thereafter.

So, the morning she called saying she was on her way to my house (“Leave the kids home with Leah–I’ll be there in five minutes”), I wasn’t surprised by the invitation. But I was shocked by the expression on her face when I climbed in the car.

“It’s Lucinda,” she said. “She needs us now!” She roared out of the neighborhood and down 56^th West to the 7-11 which used to stand on the corner before Hunter High was built. Ahead I could see an ambulance with sirens blaring as it pulled into the store parking lot. A couple of paramedics with medical cases jumped out of the truck. My friend yanked the wheel to a hard left and slammed on the brakes as we skidded across the asphalt and slid into a spot next to the ambulance. A fireman was already unloading a stretcher from the back of the truck. By then, paramedics were bent over our friend Lucinda who had collapsed in entry of the store and was gasping for breath. Standing in the doorway were her two youngest children, sobbing.

My friend leaped from the car and rushed over to them. Pulling them close, she murmured, “We’re here. It’s going to be OK. Sh-sh-shush.” The children buried their heads in the safety of her arms, their sobs muffled by their relief at seeing a familiar face.

I headed for Lucinda, whose own face was now tinged a blue-gray; she was gasping for air. The store manager came out wringing his hands. “A bee,” he said. “She was stung by a bee; she’s allergic.” At the time there were no cell phones to call for help or dispensable epi-pens readily available. The paramedic nodded but didn’t look up from the oxygen mask he was applying to Lucinda’s face. His partner raced back to the truck for an epinephrine shot. After about five minutes, Lucinda’s struggled breathing eased, and the panic in her eyes receded.

“You know her?” The paramedic looked up at me.

I nodded, giving him her name and address. I leaned down to Lucinda, who was a single mom of four with very little extended family support. “Don’t worry about the kids.” I whispered. “We’ll pick up the other two and keep them all till you’re OK.” She raised a trembling arm and squeezed my hand. Then she was lifted onto the gurney which was loaded through the truck’s double doors, and she disappeared from view. As the ambulance pealed out of the parking lot, its lights flashed, and the siren began screaming again.

“How did you know?” I asked my friend.

She tightened her grip around the children. Tears filled her eyes. “I heard a voice whisper, ‘Go now. Lucinda needs you.’ And I saw this place in my head.”  We loaded the children into her van, stopping only to buy them each a small treat. Then we headed home.

Lucinda spent a day or two in the hospital. For Christmas that year she crocheted each of us a beautiful multi-colored afghan which I still use today, almost forty years later. It’s warmth never fails to  remind me that we all have dark and sometimes terrifying days. It’s infinitely comforting to be certain that Heaven knows not only our names, but our needs. We do not have to face the dark alone.

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

My mother told me I was born with two thumbs on my left hand. I assume she knew what she was talking about, but I have no memory from my infant self. The doctors guessed that some gene coding got confused and created two tiny appendages where only one was supposed to be one. During my first week or so of life, some surgeon made a choice and decided one thumb was enough. My mom said they tied a string around the extra one, short-circuiting the blood supply, and it fell off on its own. Maybe? I have no idea. What I have left is an awkward narrow digit like a forefinger with a nail and a smooth lump where a joint should be, but isn’t–all of which is attached to my hand by a normal joint at the base of the “thumb”.

Oddly enough, I have no baby pictures which show the double growths, so I have to trust my mother didn’t make up this story. My brother used to refer to me as a freak outside the family of humanoids  because I only have one opposable thumb. (Turns out, one thumb was enough to thump him solidly in the nose.) I hardly ever notice this tiny disability except when I’m peeling vegetables or braiding hair. The thumb doesn’t bend, so I keep dropping whatever I’m trying hold for my right hand to work on. 

Because I am right handed, I was well into middle age before my thumb presented much of a problem of any kind. One day I was writing an assignment on the board when a student interrupted me unexpectedly. Startled, I turned around, slamming my left hand hard into the blackboard. A sharp pain whizzed down my thumb into my wrist. It hurt. The thumb throbbed for a while, but I took a couple of Ibuprofen, and the pain eased off. I wasn’t worried about it healing. I knew there was no joint inside to break, so I figured I’d just bruised it, and time would take care of it.

But several weeks later it still ached, and I was still popping pain relief morning and night. On a routine visit for a check-up, I mentioned the problem to my doc. He’d never noticed my deformed thumb—practically no one ever did, but he said if it was still bothering me, I ought to have it looked at. He sent me to an orthopedic hand specialist at Cottonwood Hospital. I felt a little foolish when I introduced myself at the reception desk.

“What’s you problem, Ma’am?”

I held up my thumb.

“Oh!” She smiled pleasantly. “If you’ll take a seat, the doctor will see you.”

A few minutes later, a nurse showed up and led me across the hall to an x-ray machine. “We need a picture,” she said. Of three inches of thumb? It seemed like a lot of trouble.

Once a tech took photos of the thumb from several points of view, the nurse had me sit back down in the waiting room. I waited. Then I waited some more. Other patients who had arrived after me came and went. Almost an hour passed. Finally, the nurse came back.

“Mrs. Voorhies? You’re going to want to see this.” She walked me down a hall to a small room crowded  with 15 or 20 people—some of them wearing white coats with stethoscopes, some in scrubs, all staring intently at a dozen enlarged pictures glowing with a foot tall image of my stunted little thumb. The buzz of discussion stopped abruptly when I walked in.

“Mrs. Voorhies?” A doc separated himself from the group. “Thanks for coming in. None of us have ever seen anything like your thumb before. It’s fascinating.”

Great. Now I was a medical anomaly. They asked me a bunch of questions I couldn’t answer (I had been a newborn after all) about what medical procedure had been done. In the end, the x-rays showed a crack right across the bone where a joint would have been had it been a more normal shape. Scar tissue was already starting to form. “It’s well on it’s way to healing itself,” the doc told me. He gave me a little splint to keep the thumb stable and sent me home.

The next day I reported all this to my students, and after they stopped laughing, one of them said, “I guess we all have something.”

Yep. I guess we do. Most of us learn to adapt. Sometimes it’s obvious like my fractured thumb; sometimes it’s not. That’s the danger of assumptions. Just because the outside seems OK, doesn’t mean there’s not a wound within. But like my little thumb, patience with a dose of special care is the prescription which gives most of us the time we need to heal.

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

Being an active member of a volunteer church can be a lot of work. And in my case, it was almost always “work” I didn’t have any idea how to accomplish. Like the time I was called as a Blazer leader when the LDS church was still connected to Boy Scouts of America. After two years of volunteering, I had learned to tie a sheepshank knot (which apparently has nothing to do with sheep), use a compass for orienteering, and teach 10 boys to play a Kazoo for a skit during Pack Meeting. Useful skills, I guess, but not very marketable.

I once was asked to stock the kitchens in two church buildings with “whatever they need”. I had a field day at Orson Gygi’s. Who knew how easy it was to spend $10,000 dollars on plates, cups, and silverware? Not surprisingly, the sales folks were thrilled to see me coming.

But there were some church assignments that scared me to death. When I my husband and I were part of a college married student ward, I had to conduct a regular meeting. I do not like being in charge, and I spent a half hour in my bathroom throwing up before every meeting. But, as they say in Monte Python, “I got better.”

When the Bishop asked me to be the ward music coordinator, I started a youth choir because, whereas most adults avoid participation in choirs, kids show up. For a couple of years, we had a choir of young people which was the envy of the stake. We specialized in simple music—largely because I couldn’t handle anything more complex, and we averaged 20 to 25 voices. I became very friendly with a couple of Day Murray Music employees who scoured their sheet music collections for me. Twenty-five years later, one of them has five kids and lives down the street.  

It wasn’t until my husband and I were Inner City missionaries in a Spanish Branch that it finally became obvious to me how all we volunteers managed to keep a half dozen organizations for adults and children spinning like the plates on sticks in a juggler’s act (wobbly sometimes, but still moving). The Branch President announced the date of our coming branch conference when all the dignitaries from the Stake organizations would show up in force. I was asked to be in charge of the Relief Society choir for the meeting because missionaries can do anything. Right?

I spoke to the Relief Society president (who was fluent in English, thank goodness); we choose a beautiful hymn arrangement for three parts in Spanish since at least 1/3 of our older sisters spoke no English. We decided our best option for participation was to take 10-15 minutes of practice in each Relief Society meeting for the four Sundays before the conference. It was a good plan, but there were seldom more than a dozen women in Relief Society, and the “dozen” were never not the same women twice in a row.

And I discovered another big obstacle which I had never before had to face. I had no trouble leading the music; I even had only a little trouble reading the Spanish text, but I lost my place instantly if I tried to translate from Spanish to English in my head. (I have since had infinitely more sympathy for any English as a second language speaker.) I kept getting lost between the music and the text. It was going to be a lot more challenging than I expected. The good news was, the sisters in the branch loved to sing. The bad news was I way out of my depth.

Finally, the pianist—another missionary and former member of the Tabernacle Choir—suggested we have one of the choir members in the front row subtlety beat the rhythm of the piece to prompt me should  I get lost—which happened EVERY time we practiced.

We had never had more than 15 women total rehearse with us, but a whole new problem arose during the conference when the Stake President announced the musical number. Virtually every woman in the audience rose from their seats and came to the join the choir on the stand–even teenagers and Primary girls. I panicked. It was bad enough the choir had to deal with my inexperience, but now we had at least 30 singers who had never even seen the music! I took a deep breath and signaled the piano to begin.

I was enormously relieved when the piano, the choir, and I all managed to end together. I remember fighting back tears of frustration because this “volunteer” job was clearly way beyond my ability, and I was stricken with guilt at having put women whom I had come to love in such a position. Then a very odd thing happened.

When the meeting was finished, the Stake President went out of his way to find me and tell me how exceptional the music number had been. The Branch President stood near the steps of the podium and told each sister how lovely the music was, and how much he appreciated their time and efforts. By the time I made my way out of the chapel, dozens of people had stopped me to comment of the beauty of the music. Blinking back my tears, I reminded myself it was very generous of them to overlook my lack of skill. Sensing my unease, the pianist came up behind me and linked her arm in mine. “Sister Voorhies,” she whispered. “If we’ve done all we can, the angels sing with us.” Oh. . .  Sometimes it’s easy to forget– when we’re volunteering in a Heavenly endeavor, no matter how small, we don’t have to labor alone.

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

I never expected to be one a first name basis with a skunk, but then there have been a lot of creatures my husband has introduced me to which I had carefully avoided previous to marrying him. All too often, his fascination with nature’s denizens has disrupted my carefully constructed environmental safety zone. As far as I can tell, it has never once occurred to him that most species would prefer to complete their entire life-cycle without human interruption.

After my husband graduated from BYU with a degree in Economics (which he will tell you allows him to understand complex international finance strategies but has never earned him a single penny), my uncle offered him a job in Bozeman, Montana, managing a brand new Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. Prior to his opening the store, he spent a few weeks in Salt Lake City training at various KFC locations.  Daughter #1–less than a year old–and I stayed in Albuquerque with my parents, while he bunked in Salt Lake with our closest friends from college who had just bought a house in Murray.

My husband gets bored easily, so when he wasn’t working, he looked around for something to fill his spare time. He picked driving a tractor. He’d always had a secret yearning to climb up in the cab, rev up that powerful engine, and race across an unplowed field. (I’m pretty sure the idea of actually spending a day in the hot sun working for a living was not part of that dream.) Fortunately for him, my former roommate had married a fellow who was working on a PhD in agriculture. He managed an actual farm in Cedar Fort with an actual tractor which he used to plow 50 or 100 acres or so, if memory serves

When my husband realized this, he got a gleam in his eye similar to Dorothy’s when she saw the Emerald City. He begged and pleaded and finally convinced our friend Paul to let him try his hand driving the tractor. I’m not sure how much help he was, but he spent several afternoons working in the fields fulfilling his heart’s desire. On one pass through the field, he unintentionally ran over a skunk’s nest. Only a single tiny baby survived. Naturally, he stopped abruptly, climbed down and rescued the kit, tucking it under his arm until he could get it to safety. He reasoned it would make a lovely pet for Daughter #1 when she was older.

There was one small impediment to his plan. Skunks have a serious offensive weapon when disturbed. My husband borrowed an abandoned bird cage from our friends to house the small creature in their back yard temporarily; then he was off to the local library for an evening of research on how to de-scent a skunk. Armed with that information, he convinced a local Murray dentist to give him a very small prescription for ether and also lend him a couple of surgical tools.

He designated our friends’ basement as his work area by spreading a thick layer newspaper out over an old table. A sniff of ether and the baby skunk went immediately to sleep. My husband did exactly as the borrowed vet textbook instructed and turned the skunk’s rectum inside out to reveal the two scent glands. Using surgical scissors, he successfully clipped one side loose, but when he twisted the scissors to cut the other attached sack, he pierced it with the scissor’s sharp point, sending its sulfur-containing chemicals (called mercaptans) spraying in every direction: a miasmic fog which settled over the basement floor.

Nothing if not thorough, my husband over-builds every project he tackles, but though he tried every cleaning product he’d ever heard of, starting with tomato juice—which does not eliminate the odor, only helps mask it—moving to beer and even oatmeal, also ineffective. He scoured my friend’s considerable collection of hygienic products including bleach, Lysol, Spic ’n span, etc. But it was weeks before the smell finally wore away.

Unfortunately, upstairs my friend had to deal with unintended consequences. She had had a baby only three days younger than Daughter #1. In fact, we had gone to the same doctor, and she had delivered her daughter in the same bed to which I had been assigned the three days before. She had had severe morning sickness every day from the moment she became pregnant. She had even thrown up on the delivery table. And now she was pregnant again.

Her basement oozed skunk. For days, she scrubbed and sprayed, attempting to dilute nature’s finest protective covering. She used vinegar, bleach, and sunlight where she could open windows. All of it helped. None of it eliminated the smell. She lost a dozen pounds emptying the contents of her stomach every time she went past the basement door or had to go downstairs to do laundry. My husband was mostly oblivious to her misery as he was gone long hours training, but far way away in Albuquerque, I agonized with her.

Eventually, the skunk—who survived the amateur surgery—came home to our house, but it was never happy. A wily little critter, it slipped out of its cage several times, snapped at my husband whenever he fed it, and one day, it simply disappeared. My husband speculated it was stolen rather than lost because pet skunks were popular at the time. I hoped that was true because it was too small to protect itself, and it had lost its only defense against predators.

But the real heroes of this story are our friends who not only still spoke to us, but once again but opened their home to us and our four children when we moved to Salt Lake years later. Their tale of the skunk invasion had by then become legend, and they laughed over and over again as they told it to new acquaintances. Skunks have their place in nature’s hierarchy, but friends like those surely earned a gold star in Heaven. And if, as some say, the Lord provides each of us a mansion in the sky, I guarantee mine will have beds ready for them.

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

‘Tis the season for families to visit amusements parks with children racing from ride to ride seeking adrenaline and nausea simultaneously. Risk-taking has never been part of my nature. I’ve always had a secret, nagging fear in the back of my mind that I’d be thrown off the Wild Mouse as it flipped around a corner, or we’d all crash into a line of stranded cars on the roller coaster. But I never expected it would be the mellow Carousel which would launch me into the Twilight Zone.

My husband used to work for an internationally famous computer simulation company housed on the University of Utah campus. Every year to celebrate their on-going success, Evans and Sutherland threw the company picnic at Lagoon for families of employees: free passes and lots of food for as long as you could stand to stay. Starting in mid-winter, my teenagers charted the date on the calendar, asking for time off work months in advance. When the big day came, they hooked up with friends in other employee families. My husband, who got bored easily, usually volunteered to take the middle-aged children to the water park, which that year left me solely in charge of only Son #6. He was a study little fellow, two-and-a-half years old, who cheerfully dragged me across the park to ride on his heart’s desire—the merry-go-round.

The Lagoon Carousel and I had a long history. It had been the site of most of my children’s first amusement park rides when they were very young. Son #6 knew the drill, and he was adamant that he would chose only the finest horse–which meant that first we had to circle the entire ride so he could see all his options (thank you, very much). When he finally decided on his mount,  I helped him up and strapped him in, intending to stand next to him to keep him from colliding with the floor. He had other ideas. He kicked me and demanded, “Do it myself!” I sighed, backed off, and settled on a bench held up by a pair of swans conveniently provided for parents in my situation.

The calliope began. My son rotated up and down, squealing with glee as we circled round and round. I had my eyes glued to him, when suddenly, the music dimmed. The noise of the midway crowds disappeared, and a clear voice across from me said, “Are you happy?” Startled, I ripped my gaze away from Son #6 and saw a sleek, sophisticated older woman with graying hair and piercing eyes seated across the swans from me. I remember wondering if she were an E & S employee? Or maybe Mrs. Evans, herself?

“What?” I said, annoyed at being distracted from my protection detail. Now I noticed the quiet all around me. It was unnerving.

“Are you happy?” she repeated.

I stared at her; then my tongue took on a life of it’s own. “Of course, I’m not happy. I have a bunch of kids. My husband’s salary doesn’t stretch far enough. I spend my days changing diapers and refereeing arguments,” and I reeled off a long litany of minor irritations. I could still see my son laughing as he bobbed up and down on his horse, but no sound came from his lips.

Calmly, the woman listened to my tirade. When I ran out of breath, she said, “You should do something about that.”

Mesmerized for a moment, my mother-instincts finally broke the connection between us, and I stole another glance at my little boy. As I did, calliope music on the merry-go-round rose again in volume; the clamor of the midway enveloped us. When I turned back to the woman, she had literally vanished. Though I searched as I roamed through the park with my children for the rest of the day, I  never saw her again.

Some hours after I went to bed that night, I lay awake, troubled by my encounter on the carousel. About 2 AM, restless and unable to sleep, I crawled out of bed and wandered into the dining room, switching on the overhead light as I went. “I SHOULD do something about that,” I thought. And pulling out a pen, I wrote the down words which I intend NEVER to be inscribed on my tombstone. (I should warn you, your English teacher was right—people in the free world still write limericks. This is mine.)

Here lies the mother of eight,

Whose life was in such a terrible state,

She got nothing done,

Never had any fun—

A fate too awful to contemplate.

I posted my little poem on the bathroom mirror, and that simple action changed the direction of my life. I took a vow that night I would learn something new every single year from that day on. And I have kept my promise.

Among other adventures since then, I have rappelled off an 80-foot cliff, made a wedding dress, snorkeled in Hawaii, hiked in Denali, earned a master’s degree, written a novel, taken watercolor lessons (with less than stellar results, I might add). I’ve been white water rafting, stood on a hill in Greece surrounded by the winds of 4,000 years of history, read a 400 page book in Spanish (a language which I do not speak), became a high school English teacher, learned to make ganache—think deep rich chocolate and heavy cream. I have spoken face to face with kangaroos in Australia (it should be noted that they did not speak back), made dozens of quilts for the babies of people I care about, explored the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and was elected to public office.

I’ve never been inclined to fanciful imagination. But even after more than 30 years, I cannot explain those moments on the carousel. Still today, I sometimes hear the eerie, tinkling music of The Twilight Zone whispering in my head. Shakespeare was right—there really are “more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.” I have been there. I know.