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

Son #1 has spent several full days in the last month cleaning out his elderly mother-in-law’s home and getting it ready for sale. (She and I are not that far apart in age, so I am entitled to call her “elderly”.) He called me after one of those long days and warned me that I needed to start getting rid of stuff immediately so he doesn’t have to do this when I pass on. I don’t blame him. I don’t want him to have to go through my stuff either. I made a vow to start winnowing down my possessions immediately. But truthfully, Son #1 and I know the problem isn’t me. It’s his dad—who cheerfully declares if he needs to, he can recreate our current standard of living up until about 10 years ago (because he owns one of everything ever thrown away–and it takes about 10 years for most people to start discarding their stuff).

In the days when neighborhoods used to sponsor Deseret Industries drives, we’d all put our no longer useful belongings out of the curb for pick-up. For my husband it was an opportunity not to be missed. He’d wander around loading donations he thought we might need someday into the back of our VW van just ahead of the DI truck—with our neighbors watching and shaking their heads from their front windows. We are still using a pedestal weight scale he grabbed off a neighbor’s curb somewhere in the early 90’s and repaired—truth.

When we bought our house in West Jordan 20 years ago, my husband built a double-wide, double-deep garage to house all the tools for his very eccentric hobbies. It got so full, boxes spilled into the unfinished portion of our basement and then overflowed into a canvas garage tent on the side of the house. Anytime we have a family gathering, one topic of discussion is always “How can we get dad to throw away some of his crap.” (An actual quote.) Every once in a while, I get irritated, and I start going through the boxes piled up downstairs. This was our conversation last week.

Me: We need to move all your medieval cookbooks and armor manuals out of the food storage area and into the garage. We are running out of space down there.

Him: I’m planning to donate them all to the BYU library.

Me: Why?

Him: All the original ones in the BYU Library have been stolen. They need my copies.

Me: Who stole them?

Him: I dunno. Somebody like me, I guess.

Me: There is nobody like you.

Him: Humph!

Me: Well, now seems like a good time for a donation—while you are still alive to feel the satisfaction of your contribution.

Him: I’m not ready to do that yet.

Me: You are almost 76. When will you be ready?

Him: Ten or fifteen years, maybe.

A decade ago when I had yet another urge to get rid of some of his stuff, at the bottom of a box of old Popular Mechanics magazines, I found a mimeographed copy of a Houston, Texas, ward sacrament  program from 1958. His mother was listed as the organist. “I’m just going to chuck this,” I said.

He grabbed it out of my hand and read it carefully. “We might need this.”

“What for?”

“They might hold a meeting like this again.”

“Your mother passed away 45 years. She’s not likely to be playing the organ.”

“Still . . .” he said, and he tucked it away.                                                              

Recently, Son #1 convinced his dad to hold a garage sale, “just for the things you’ve lost interest in, Dad.” All the boys came over and sorted through the garage, emptied boxes from downstairs, and laid the whole mess out of the driveway one Saturday morning. The good news is that my husband made about $1000 dollars in cash which he loaded into his “hobbies” bank account. The bad news: there’s plenty of stuff left for at least a dozen more garage sales.

Oddly enough, my husband doesn’t really qualify as a hoarder. He actually remembers all the stuff he owns. Everybody in the neighborhood knows if they need a tool, call James. And he’s happy not only to lend the specific item, but he’ll also even come over and teach you how to use it. When we got married, he promised me that if the Prophet ever announced we were all trekking to Missouri, I wouldn’t have to walk. He had enough scrap steel stacked up in the garage to build me a train.

I have to admit, the older I get, the better that sounds.

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

My husband used to say that he felt sorry for people “who have a girl and a boy and think they have one of every kind.” It’s a message most child-development researchers should take into account before they dive into writing parenting instruction books. You’d kind of assume that having five sons in a row meant we’d had enough “boy” experience to just float right through the eight or ten boy-raising years before Daughter #2 arrived—at least after we’d managed to get Son #1 moving in what we hoped was a productive direction! It was enormously disappointing to discover that what works for one “does not fit all.”

Son #2 was permanently thrown out of the nursery at church for biting other children—a behavior he learned from defending himself against his bigger, older brother, Son #1.

When Son #3 was a two-year-old, he was sitting on my very pregnant lap as I was trying to explain that soon he would have another little brother. “When the baby comes,” I said, “Ben will sit on daddy’s lap, and mama will hold the new baby.” This change of hierarchy didn’t ‘sit’ well with him, so he twisted around and delivered a ferocious punch to Son #4—who, unfortunately, was still residing in my tummy. I almost fell off the chair. Later Son #3 was so naturally orderly that when he ended up sharing a room with Son #2, he laid down a masking tape line on the carpet dividing the room in half so his brother’s mess didn’t hamper his lifestyle.

When Son #4 was born, he didn’t bother to cry. That was inefficient. He just turned his little naked body around so he could see the doctor and peed in his face. Even as a small child, he was a natural risk-assessment manager, analyzing whatever situation with which he was faced and making thoughtful, prudent, choices.

So it was something of a shock when Son # 5 leaped into the scene. He hated sitting still, refused to let anyone but his mother hold him, and cried pretty much non-stop until he discovered his chubby little legs could run. In fact, between ages two and four, Son #5 was so unrestrainable, he required a leash whenever we left the boundaries of the neighborhood. At least a couple of times a week, other moms would stop me and ask where they could buy one for their own adventurous sons. I should have bought stock in the company.

When Son #5 was four-years-old, one bright morning I sent him down the street for his first day at our neighborhood pre-school. He’d insisted we buy him a lunchbox like his older siblings carried to school even though he would only be gone two hours, and pre-school was just four doors away. Off he went, delighted with his new status as a “school-boy”. But when I woke him the next morning, he refused to get out of bed. “I thought you liked your teacher and your class yesterday,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, “but they do papers. I’m not old enough to do papers.” At least he was honest.

I was relieved when Son #5 discovered that elementary school included recess—there was a subject he could get behind. In fifth or sixth grade, he broke his clavicle playing illegal tackle football on the playground. He didn’t tell me about it till I got home from work late that afternoon. After we spent a couple of hours in the emergency room getting x-rays and a shoulder brace and pain meds, etc., I asked him why he hadn’t had the school contact me immediately. “You were teaching. I didn’t know teachers could leave till after the last bell rang.” I assured him that the principal would find me a sub if there were a disaster at home. “Oh,” he said. And six weeks later, when he broke the other collarbone in yet another illegal tackle game, he had the school secretary call immediately.

Naturally, Son #6 wasn’t like any of his brothers, but we were long past expecting that we might get a break and have a “repeat” behavior pattern we had already learned to handle. Son #6 just out problem-solved everybody else and did exactly as he pleased. By then we were so old, it just wasn’t worth the effort to get too excited about it.

I always felt lucky to have two daughters to hang out with, but the one bit of information that those child researchers might have mentioned when I was still hoping to make sense of my sons’ wildly different personalities was that “boys grow up to take care of their moms.” I had no idea.

After I had a mild heart attack, Son #5 came from Colorado to help out. He was half-way through mowing our rather large yard when he disappeared. An hour later he came back towing a riding lawn tractor. “Mom,” he said, “you’re too old to be pushing a grass cutter. Use this instead.”

Son #1 has called to check on us every single week since he left home almost 30 years ago—including two years in Canada and two in Australia. And the fact that he was far away didn’t deter him from seeing that his brothers filled in for him when we needed something.

When Son #2 passed away some years ago, it was Son #3 who sat next to me with his arm around my shoulders the next morning, and we wept together. He even took a week off in the middle of a medical school semester and flew home to explain hospital procedures when his dad required 14 hours of brain surgery– plus months of recovery.

Sons #4 and 6 untangle all my technology chaos without hardly a roll of their eyes and regularly show up to help with projects I don’t even know need to be repaired.  But best of all, I see each of my sons’ faces reflected in the grandchildren who race in to grab a drink and a snack after swimming for hours in the backyard on summer afternoons.

I guess the instruction manual didn’t matter as much as the love did.

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

This week, after only 100 pages in, I tossed a book in the trash. If my kids are reading this, I’m pretty sure they just dropped their phones or tablets in shock. Over the years they have claimed—only half-joking–that I never met a book I didn’t like. This particular one was a paperback thriller by a female author who has been on the bestseller list at one time or another. It cost me $5 or $6 off the shelf at Sam’s Club, and I felt no compunction at all to finish it.  I like a good crime story as much as the next reader, but the minute it reverted to gratuitous sex and violence, out it went.

When I became a parent, monitoring what books/reading material my children had access to suddenly became a priority. I wondered how on earth my parents figured that out? When my kids were young, it was fairly easy. I took them to the library, and I supervised what they checked out. At home, I was the one handling the income, so I chose the books we put on our shelves. But school? That was a whole different conundrum! And once I became a teacher, the issue of appropriate reading material exploded. Whereas before I had tried to protect my own kids from what I considered to be unsuitable, or a colossal waste of time, or downright damaging, now I had 200 sets of parents who were trying to navigate exactly the same issues, and I was the target if I upset their family criteria.

Fortunately, the school system had some protocols in place which helped. My district had a committee of volunteer parents and educators who read proposed additions to classroom curriculums and evaluated the purpose, value, quality, and age appropriateness of the desired reading material—both fiction and non-fiction. They set up protocols to help teachers be flexible if a parent objected to a specific text. In my department we had a couple of storage bookrooms filled with classroom sets of approved curriculum options. If a parent didn’t wish a child to read Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, there were always several substitutions the student could choose instead. (*I loved those bookrooms. One semester when I had a an unusually competent student teacher, I sat at a table in the bookroom for one class period every other day and read all the classics on the shelves which I had never had a chance to read before. Nerdy, I know. But glorious!)

In spite of the care I–and most educators I knew–took in our choices of classroom materials, I kept hoping for some kind of over-arching standard to help me figure out how to teach both my students and my own kids what material was worth their time and effort—a standard simple enough I could both remember it easily and trust its application in most situations where a criteria was needed.

As a mom, I was tempted to just choose everything for my own kids. I was, after all, a semi-expert in literature. Couldn’t I keep them safe from pornography or vitriolic political dissention or sometimes just the silliness which comes more natural to some kids than others. As a teacher, what happened when students left my classroom? Could they choose literature wisely and productively? Could they see through the fancy wrappings some authors used to circulate insidious or degrading material. Did they know how to analyze opinion pieces and not be afraid to ask critical questions? In other words, could they think for themselves, and would they be strong enough to do so when I wasn’t nearby to help? My solution came from a most unexpected memory.

Years before, when I was a junior at BYU, I had a mother from my family’s neighborhood at home who called me to say that her daughter was coming to school as a freshman. Would I watch out for her, help her figure out how to get to her classes, buy books, etc., and generally hold her hand until she got settled and comfortable with her new surroundings? I was agreeable, but it turned out to be a much more difficult job than I expected. Twice that semester, this girl was asked by roommates to find another place to live. They complained that she never did her share of the chores; she left her books and clothing strewn around the apartment; she “borrowed” other people’s clothes without permission; and she ate whatever she found in the fridge, regardless of who owned it. Plus, she had no idea how to manage money, so she was behind on her rent and tuition. Eventually, the girl was so miserable, when she went home for Christmas break, she refused to go back.

It was with some serious trepidation that I agreed to spend an afternoon during that break with the girl’s mom, who was distraught over her daughter’s college experience. (I was, after all, the kid—and she was the MOTHER. What the heck did I know?) On the other hand, I liked and respected this mom. She was long divorced and had raised and supported two kids all by herself—a hero by any standard.

Because this woman had spent so many years trying to be both mom and dad for her kids, she had felt compelled to shield them from as many of the difficulties of life that she could. She made their beds every morning; she chose their clothes. She kept an immaculate household so they wouldn’t be troubled by having to do chores. She sat next to them every night supervising their homework. They never babysat or mowed lawns for pocket money. They didn’t even help her wash the car weekly. She confided to me she hadn’t realized that in her protecting them from the troubles of everyday experience, they were totally unequipped to manage lives of their own.

Therein was the standard I had been looking for! I didn’t want to be the parent who denied her children access to the world because of fear—an all-consuming need to keep them safe from harm, or in the mistaken belief that kids could somehow be corralled inside a sheltered environment which would never allow them to encounter whatever threats the world might hold. Instead, my goal should be to teach them (and my students as well) how to make their own healthy, productive choices, and then consistently keep guiding them in that direction. My hope was that when I was no longer beside them,—a day that always comes no matter how reluctant a parent (or teacher) is to recognize it–I could trust their ability to choose for themselves.

It was enormously satisfying to catch a glimpse of that progress the day that Son #6, then in his late teens, held up a fantasy book (his favorite genre at the time) which I had given him for Christmas. By then, I wasn’t reading much fantasy anymore, so I had chosen the book based on positive reviews from a number of respected sources. But I actually hadn’t read the book myself. “Not this one, Mom,” he said. “You wouldn’t approve it.” And he crossed it off his reading list. A huge step in the right direction.

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

Christmas gift giving at my house can be a mine field. Because my husband has always stepped to the music of a “different drummer—however measured or far away,” as Thoreau enjoined almost 200 years ago, it’s almost impossible to find the perfect gift for him. A long consecutive string of gift “failures” has taught me to NEVER buy a tie or any item resembling clothes, for that matter. In my husband’s eyes, a “gift” is defined as something his highly eccentric imagination demands, but he can’t justify spending the money for. That’s my job.

Every year, a couple of weeks before Christmas, my husband now gives family members a list of items he deems would make appropriate gifts. Once he wanted a violin—a reasonable request since he was first chair in the high school orchestra and had dreams of joining the Murray Symphony. Between our purchase and the actual opening of the gift, however, he became enamored of building medieval armor. And thus, the lonely violin sits on my husband’s closet shelf–hoping for its owner to someday notice its existence. Another year he wanted in-line skates. He had visions of racing down the streets alongside his teenager children. In actual fact, he never got closer than a block or two behind them. Demoralizing. Now the skates are permanent residents underneath our bed.

At the top of his list one year was an anvil. Really. And anvil. You know—a metalworking tool “consisting of a large block of metal, with a flattened top surface, upon which another object is struck” (thank you, Google). In those days, my husband was deep into sword building. Authentic broadswords. I’m guessing that in his head, he could see himself swathed in a leather apron, standing at a forge, his muscles bulging as he strikes a mighty hammer’s blow against the glowing blade of red-hot steel.

It had never occurred to me you could actually buy such a thing as an anvil. Naively, I thought every blacksmith made his own. Moving down to the next item on his list, a gift card to Lowe’s seemed a far more reasonable choice. But fate intervened. Who knew? I ran across an anvil in the want ads. On sale, no less.  (In my own defense, I’d like to point out that no one I know personally has ever bought an anvil. Spoiler alert: they are not cheap!) It took three of my sons to lift it up the stairs and into the house. We set it behind the Christmas tree and wrapped it in situ as none of us had the heart to try and move it anywhere else.

Christmas morning, we handed out gifts, careful to leave the large package behind the tree for last. “I think that’s yours,” I casually mentioned to my husband when every other gift had been distributed. He loves presents, so he flashed me a delighted grin and bent over to pick it up. Nothing happened. It didn’t move an inch no matter how he tugged. Turning toward us, he narrowed his eyes, and stared at each of us in turn. We all managed to look innocent—except the two-year-old who hadn’t looked innocent since birth. Son #1 laughed good-naturedly and joined his dad behind the tree. The two of them relocated the gift so that my husband could open it. A genuine anvil. HE WAS THRILLED. Best present ever!

Except for the year we gave him 100 pounds of scrap steel. That was a winner, too.

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

When I was young in the years after WWII, military families were caught in a weird vortex of the American social hierarchy. Soldiers home from the front often had unique and cutting edge technical knowledge and experience, aligning them with members of the middle to upper classes, but their pay scales reflected more nearly the income of social groups much closer to society’s lower strata of financial measurement. Balancing the characteristics of those two worlds was often a precarious tightrope walk with some very eccentric casualties.

One of those casualties involved family traditions. Because my dad was an Air Force officer, he owned his own “mess dress” uniform, a kind of tuxedo with the added splendor of medals–which were awarded for serious combat valor–decorating his jacket. He pulled the uniform out of the closet for dinners with the high command which were every bit as formal as a multi-course meal at Downtown Abbey. And because my dad also PhD in Educational Psychology, he understood the value of traditions in unifying families for the long haul. So he was always trying to merge formal tradition with limited income. Which is how I learned to elope.

He took several anthropology classes as part of his doctoral program where he studied, among other things, centuries old traditional rites of passage ceremonies to signify a young person’s transition to adulthood. My dad, who had a wicked sense of humor, decided I needed just such an official demarcation from childhood to adulthood. So when I was sixteen, he bought me a cheap suitcase and a short ladder. He put ladder outside my bedroom window and had me practice carrying my suitcase down the steps to sneak out of the house just in case, down the road, he didn’t approve of my marital choice. (Good News—my future husband had a college degree, so we avoided the whole “escape” scenario.)

The conflict between cash and social status became all the more acute during the holidays. Some of our military friends dragged huge boxes of Christmas decorations from one assignment to another so they could fill their homes with what they deemed were appropriate celebrations for a family of their position in society. My mother came from a modest background in a tiny Nevada community which no one who wasn’t born there has ever heard of. She thought it was inefficient to bother with stuff we only used a couple of weeks a year. That conflict was resolved to all parties’ satisfaction when we moved to Kirtland Air Force Base.

We were assigned officer’s housing on base. Turned out several of our neighbors were early astronauts. At the time, medical testing relating to space travel was done at Lovelace Clinic—down the street from the base. For all the neighborhood kids, those space jocks were the epitome of superheroes—and we got to sit at their tables, eat peanut butter sandwiches, and listen to men talk in real terms about adventures no one in history had ever faced before. At the local schools every classroom had models of the solar system hanging above us. it was exhilarating.

Even the base exchange was selling Christmas ornaments which were “space” themed. My dad, the inveterate and curious shopper in the family, simply couldn’t resist. He bought a couple of dozen of them. My mom was not thrilled with such an oddball assortment added to the handmade and heirloom decorations she’d collected over the years. What to do? What to do?

Once again, my dad’s sense of humor rose to the occasion. He tied a string of white thread and one of my mother’s sewing straight pins to the end of each “space” ornament and hung them at random on the living room ceiling. As I recall, my mother stood watching with her arms folded and a frown on her face. She later admitted that it did look seriously festive for Saturn and Mercury to be swinging gently in the air flow from the heater vents.

We kids loved it! So did our space addict friends. For the couple of weeks before Christmas a steady stream of kids, teenagers, whole families, even a real astronaut who lived two doors down from us came to check out our Space Christmas Ceiling. It became a cherished family tradition.

Once I married, Christmas wasn’t official until the ceiling was aglow with shining, spinning ornaments—now less directly space oriented, chosen simply for the delight of their appearance. In her early teens Daughter #1 bought a couple of snowflakes to add to our collection. She liked the idea of no two snowflakes being exactly alike, so she brought home snowflakes from Alaska, Israel (yes it snowed a couple of inches in Jerusalem while she and Son # 3 were there on a semester abroad), Kenya, Sweden, even China. Then her friends began to compete to find original snowflakes as gifts for her from wherever they were in the world. Now our Christmas ceiling boasts close to 150 twisting, sparkling, even whimsical gems of design and beauty.

My dad passed away almost 20 years ago, but when his great grandchildren spend an afternoon unpacking and suspending the graceful collection above us, the family text string boasts “the snowflakes are up”, and Christmas has officially began. Somewhere just above the roof, I’m pretty sure my dad is smiling.

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

When I was newly married, my uncle, a successful real estate broker, told me that the best investment a young couple could make was to buy a house. It took a couple of years, but we saved a down payment and bought a little house in Bozeman, Montana, where my husband had his first post-college job running a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. It was a tiny two-bedroom which was almost empty the night we moved in because we only owned a couple of pieces of furniture, and we were too tired to unload our little trailer. We slept on the floor in the ‘master’ bedroom and made Daughter #1, barely five months old, a tidy little nest on the floor in the room next door.

You can imagine my new-mom panic when I went in to pick her up the next morning, and she had disappeared—an empty baby quilt lay in the spot where she should have been sleeping. There was literally nothing else in the room to hide under or behind. She wasn’t old enough to crawl. So, of course, kidnapping was my immediate conclusion. I yelled at my husband for help. He was irritatingly calm and pointed out that kidnappers didn’t usually take the children of parents who are dead broke and have thousands of dollars of college debt. Two more minutes of searching found the baby across the room hidden in the closet. Somehow the tail of the blankets she had balled up around her when she rolled in her sleep had pulled the door shut after her. That was the moment I realized my uncle was mistaken. The best investment I, personally, would ever make was sound asleep and snoring gently on the floor in front of me.

My husband’s job had a narrow profit margin, so he dedicated long hours everyday to keep labor costs low. As a result, Daughter #1 and I went to church most Sundays by ourselves. A new mom in a strange place with almost no acquaintances, I sat unnoticed in the back of the chapel until one morning when the Bishop—in a move of desperation, I’m sure–called me as the chorister. I abandoned my regular seat in the rear and moved up to the front row. Every Sunday I would walk up to music stand next to the organ where I could keep an eye on Daughter #1 playing or dozing in her infant seat as I led each hymn. That worked for a couple of months. Fortunately, as she grew, she was willing to sit on the floor with a squishy toy and stare up at me till each hymn was over. Unfortunately, we were in the middle of a sacrament hymn when Daughter #1 decided to learn to crawl. Tottering on hands and knees, she headed straight for me—right across the pedals of the organ. The startled organist looked down to see a cubby little blond cherub assisting her with the bass line of the hymn. After that, everyone in the ward knew us.

As in any serious investment, kids are a pricey venture. And time consuming. And exhausting. Some folks spend a lifetime praying for an opportunity for children which never comes, and some are reluctant to dip a toe into swirling waters of parenthood over which they may have no control. My husband was an only child and an only grandchild. He had never held a baby until he held ours the morning she was born. He confessed later that he was terrified her arm or leg would fall off when he wasn’t looking. That  threat was avoided until the birth of Son #1 who regularly tried to take his sister apart with his bare hands. He still carries the scar in his palm where he came after her for some long-forgotten grievance, and she threw a fork at him. It bled very nicely.

People often ask us, “what were you thinking, having eight kids?” My husband always answers, “we weren’t thinking at all.” There’s some truth to that. Long hours, unreliable workforce, and never a moment to catch a breath before the next crisis arrives. It’s easy to forget why we ended up in “this soap opera,” as my husband often calls it.

Then I remember the day three of my sons and a son-in-law spotted the roof of my backdoor neighbor’s shed threatening to take flight in the face of a fierce windstorm. They dropped their loaded plates of Sunday dinner and sprinted out the back door, leaping the fence, and anchoring the slats of roof until the storm passed. Or the day of Daughter #2’s wedding at our celebration luncheon when she sang a love song to her new husband. Or grandchildren lying spread out wily/nily across the living room floor on Christmas afternoon reading to one another the new books that they’ve just received at our annual Cousin’s Book Exchange.

Every long term investment is a chancy proposition. It takes time and courage to grow a healthy portfolio and demands a steady hand when its value seems to dip so precariously, it might never rise again. Families are like that. I am reminded of Paul in 1 Corinthians who said, “for now we see through a glass darkly.” Having children is a step into the clouded mist of the future. They require a lifetime commitment without guarantee of any dividends down the road. But the rewards. Ah, the rewards. That’s what Thanksgiving is all about.

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

I don’t sing much at church anymore. One—I’m old and my voice is undependable; two—I don’t hear well so sometimes I completely lose track of the pitch (highly annoying to my seatmates!); and three—my breathing is often sub-optimal. On the other hand, I notice I am actually paying more attention to the lyrics of the music with which I’ve been familiar my whole life. This week, for me, an old hymn sang a new message. The congregation was belting out Have I Done Any Good in the World Today? In my head I heard, “then wake up and do something good.” Though a simple admonition, implementation requires a very special kind of heart. Because my parents taught me as a young child to spend a few minutes each day counting my blessings, I know I’ve long been the recipient of those for whom “doing something good” is simply a way of life.

Years ago I got an email from Son #4’s Mission President notifying us that he was coming home from Argentina the day before Thanksgiving. I was a teacher. School district policy clearly stated that employees could not apply for a “personal day” off on the day previous to a state or national holiday. I’ve always been something of a rule-follower, but I this case I took a deep breath and went downstairs to talk to my principal. He was sympathetic, but he reminded me of district policy by reading it aloud to me. Then he read it again, silently.

“Hmm,” he said thoughtfully. “It appears there’s an exception here,” he paused, choosing his next words very carefully. “Policy is void should a religious observance precede the designated holiday.” He looked straight at me. “Sounds like your son coming home from his mission fills that requirement.” And he signed the exception paperwork for me. Reason: Religious Observance. For one.

Some years later, my husband called me one afternoon when I was visiting a niece across town. I could barely understand what he was saying, but it was something like “Emergency.  Come home now.” He gave up trying to explain when the noise of wind and thunder in the background overpowered his words. Fearing the worst, I dropped the phone, kissed my niece on the cheek, and exceeded the speed limit. By the time I pulled of I-15, I could see ferocious clouds swirling above the west side of the valley, the sky black with rain. Once I reached my driveway, I  spotted our forty year-old Russian olive tree laying across the fence in our backyard. The force of the wind had pulled it out of the ground by its roots.

My husband was on the back stairs to our basement desperately trying to build a dike against the flood which poured off the higher ground around us and was already a couple of inches deep . This section of the downstairs was just storage, but it wasn’t long before the water would saturate walls and carpet farther in.

I called our adult kids for help and started bailing. A few minutes later, I did a double take when I realized someone, also dripping wet, was standing beside me scooping up water. In fact, several someones. I later learned a microburst had exploded above our neighborhood; seventeen houses had been flooded. A gang of local teenagers–20 or more young people–(with help from unflooded homeowners) raced down our stairs, bringing buckets and water vacs, then going from house to house for hours until every house had carpet pulled, furniture and boxes moved to safety, and mud shoveled out. After they finished, without waiting for reward or even thanks, they headed back to their houses and picked up their video games or finished their homework.

On the horrific day when Son #2 died unexpectedly, my family, neighbors, and friends were beyond generous with their kindness and concern. But as all those who grieve know, it doesn’t just go away because time passes. Late one afternoon some months after his death, I was sitting at my desk when I was overwhelmed by the depth of my loss. One of the school custodians glanced in my room as he passed by. He was near retirement and years of dealing with teenagers had made him a bit of a curmudgeon. But he saw my face washed with tears, and he came in, pulling up a chair next to my desk. “Can I help?” he said. For almost an hour he listened as my sorrow poured out. He told me about his own brother who had passed away some time before. Then he grabbed a couple of extra boxes of Kleenex off his cart and set them in my closet. I knew the time he spent with me meant he’d have to spend an extra hour finishing his rounds before he could go home. He never checked his watch. Not once.

Now on days when I am exhausted and discouraged by a long list of problems for which I have no solutions, I find solace in the memory of so many people in my life who choose to “wake up and do something good”. They fend off the sleepless nights and give me courage to begin again tomorrow.

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

When I was a young mom, I’d occasionally watch General Conference and wonder what it would be like to be one of those women who speak at the pulpit? My first thought was always that I’d have to have an entire new wardrobe—one without baby spit-up and cooking stains. Since that wasn’t likely anywhere in the near future, I usually just went back to cleaning the toilet.

The ensuing years have proven that my life situation definitely does not suit church-wide fame. For instance, there was the morning 43 years ago when the phone rang in the kitchen. I was still getting kids off to school; nobody answered. It stopped ringing. I figured whoever it was would call back. At least ten minutes later, I walked into the kitchen to find Son #3 (then two years-old) sitting on the breakfast bar chatting away with someone on the other end of the line. “Ben!” I said. “What are you doing?”

I grabbed the phone out of his hand. “Hello?” I said. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize my son had answered when the phone rang.”

There was laughter on the other end of the line. “No problem. We had a lovely conversation.” That was astonishingly gracious of her, since it was the General Relief Society President OF THE WHOLE CHURCH who had called to let our region Relief Society know about a special meeting in the near future. I sighed and envisioned my name being redacted on some heavenly list somewhere.

Many years later I submitted a light humorous piece about my cub scout troop to the Ensign magazine—I had nine boys and a girl in that group. (Daughter #2 refused to let her brother have all the fun without her.) At the time, the magazine’s guidelines required a small photo of the author attached to the published piece. Their photographer called to set up an appointment with me. He said he wanted the background to be my home environment. “It helps people relate to your story if they can see you in your surroundings.” Hmmm?

Because I was then teaching middle school, we arranged to meet at my home an hour or so after school. Son #5 was a senior; my older kids were away at college or on missions. My husband would still be at work. The house would be quiet.

Frantically, I had cleaned the night before so that my “humble abode” would show it’s best, if worn and weary, self. This is where in novels, the plot thickens.

A couple of students delayed my exit from school, so I arrived home for my appointment only minutes before the photographer showed up. The living room was still orderly, but the kitchen and dining room looked like a robbery had taken place! Dirty dishes everywhere, cupboards open, empty bread wrappers absent-mindedly abandoned on the floor. Bacon grease sitting in a pan on the stove. And a couple of dozen eggshells littering the counters.

I knew immediately what had happened. Son #5 and his buddies had sluffed a class at the local high school and had come for home breakfast. It looked like French toast—their favorite. Evidence suggested that there were several of them. And because they tended to be straight ‘A’ students, they probably had headed out without cleaning up so as not to miss physics or calculus (or basketball—another priority) which actually required they invest some serious study. They assumed there’d be plenty of time after school to come back and clean up the mess.

The photographer beside me, I looked at the mess in dismay. I’m so sorry,” I said. “But I guess if you really want a picture of me in my true environment—here it is.”

He grinned at me. “Yeah, there were a lot of us at my house, too. Our kitchen looked just like this.”  He walked around a bit, obviously considering what might be the best angle for a photo. In the end, he chose to have me sit in front of the bookcase which divided our dining room from the larger living area. The shelves were filled with random sizes, subjects, and ages of books. From cookbooks to Dr. Seuss to a biography of Albert Einstein, there was not a single place in my home which better reflected who we were or what mattered to us.

But the truth is, I would have been OK photographed in the clutter of the kitchen amidst the mess of our everyday life. My dad once told me when we get to Heaven, a giant screen which documents our entire lives will be available for all to see. The good stuff and the bad. It’s pretty clear I was never destined for fame; but I hope the record shows what was most important to me: two year-olds who chatter away to strangers, then grow up to have two year-olds of their own, or a young friend who knew he was welcome in my kitchen regardless of the mess–and grew up to lead the high school down the street. Fame just cannot compete with that.

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

One of my favorite mystery series is Laurie King’s modern re-telling of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The books are riveting exploits without gratuitous sex or violence—unless you count the bees. In the original stories, Arthur Conan Doyle informed his readers that in retirement, Holmes cultivated hives and even wrote his own expansive study of the small insects–Practical Handbook of Bee Culture with Some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen. I am not as erudite about the life cycle of bees as is Mr. Holmes, but I have literally walked in their sticky footsteps.

I’ve always been fascinated/revolted by bugs. My husband assures me that in the next life, Heaven will be six feet deep in billions of insects who “filled the measure of their creation” and were awarded with eternal life. His certainty has always made me a little leery of being too righteous for fear of having to machete my way through a host of creeping, buzzing, flying, stinging critters at the Pearly Gates. Ewww!

Once my husband secured his teaching certificate, we bought a house on the growing west side of Salt Lake City. We were joined by about 10,000 other families, and practically overnight, our area was filled with fresh-out-of-school young people, all living on starter incomes. It wasn’t long before our area was organized into an LDS stake. Stakes do things: lots of things—meetings, dances, banquets, service projects, genealogy, sports programs. And welfare.

Most every stake has some kind of project which contributes in some way to the general good. I lived in a stake that owned an apple orchard, and members volunteered hours to cultivate, weed, spray, and harvest thousands of apples, which were then distributed to those in need nearby. I’ve also helped bag flour and sugar, and can macaroni and spaghetti. One of our closest friends managed a huge church owned cattle ranch in Florida, which provided beef for hungry families all over the world. Every stake is responsible in some way to ease the burden of those less fortunate.

There was a good deal of discussion about how that goal could be reached in our area. Socio-economically, we were light-weights in the world of welfare, but we all wanted to do our share. In some meeting somewhere, someone said, “What about beehives? Hives can be located anywhere. Honey is a universal staple. Doesn’t take a whole lot of investment. It’s perfect!” (I’m guessing there weren’t a lot of women at that meeting.)

Conveniently, we had a couple of long-time farmers in our stake boundaries, and they actually knew something about beekeeping.  A little knowledge and a whole lot of enthusiasm later, our stake bought hives and began finding volunteers to house them in backyards and open fields. There were some failures, a frozen hive or two, and a few hives that had to have new queens inserted, but overall, the bees were happy to be part of the project. I can’t remember for sure, but I think we had about 50 hives.

The bees ignored us and went merrily on their way, providing pollination for neighborhood gardens and producing honey at an impressive rate. In the end, the real problem was how to extract the honey from the hives? Considering that on average a single hive produces about 25 pounds of the sweet stuff, that is A LOT of honey. We had some smart folks in our stake, and they started reading. Small hand-cranked extractors could manage 4 or 5 hives, but it became obvious that the stake needed a commercial extractor.

Then the difficulty became where to put something the size of an above-ground swimming pool? My neighbors across the street had a double garage–the biggest one in the area. “Sure,’ they said. “You can put an extractor in here for a few days each fall when we harvest the honey.” The first year–before they knew what they were getting into–the offer was generous. The following years qualified them for sainthood.

Our welfare committee rented an extractor and organized around-the-clock teams to extract honey for the 48 to 72 hours they figured it would take. Once it was collected, it was ferried to a local welfare facility where it was bottled and labeled, then shipped where there was a need. Hallelujah! The first year was a smashing success! Except for one small detail that no one had really considered. Clean up.

There was honey everywhere. Volunteers had to traipse through the house to use the restroom; my friend’s kids were in and out of the house watching the process. Floating molecules of honey stuck to clothes, hair, walls, tables, chairs, and counters. Outside, we used pressure washers to clean surfaces off; inside, it took hands and knees labor. At some point, my friend called me and said she was planning to cut up her kitchen carpet–now thoroughly saturated with honey—and stack the pieces on shelves to use in her own food storage.

Then there was still one formidable issue to resolve. The extractor walls and floor were a couple of inches thick with dead bees, wax, and honey—a nauseating combination which nobody wanted to tackle. “We need some sisters to climb in there and clean all that stuff out.”

“Why, sisters,” I asked.

“Because you’re smaller and not as heavy. We’re all just too dang big.” I knew there was a fallacious argument in there somewhere, but nothing came immediately to mind, which led to me climbing over the edge into the giant metal bowl with a bucket, a scraper, and a sponge. I’m claustrophobic. It was a confined space. I took a deep breath and started scraping muck off the walls and the floor and handing buckets of the sticky sludge over the side to the brethren below. Every time I moved, one foot or the other stuck to the floor. Little bee bodies clung to my hair and my clothes; a few live bees were attracted to my honey-infused scent, so they landed on my shoulders and arms. Fortunately, they were still dizzy from being spun around at Warp 10 speed, so I didn’t get bitten, but I did do a good deal of gagging. That night it took three complete showers before I was clean enough to fall into bed.

Sherlock Holmes claimed that he studied bee culture because it was reminiscent of the gangs he once investigated in the London underworld. Apparently, both bees and crooks are experts at cooperation. Now that I think about it, welfare brethren aren’t so bad at collusion, either.

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

I used to know the location of virtually every horse chestnut tree between Provo and Kaysville, Utah.  A weird expertise, I admit, but eccentricity is my husband’s—and by extension—my specialty. Full grown horse chestnut trees produce spectacular flower clusters from which come golf-ball sized, sharp, spine-covered burs. When cracked open, the husks reveal a satin smooth, fat brown nut–hundreds, sometimes thousands of them from every tree. Most of the folks I ran into over the years who had these trees in their yards loved them in the spring and hated them in the fall. Though they are quite beautiful, their fruit is poisonous (unlike the chestnut variety we “roast over an open fire” at Christmas).

Through a tenuous connection with close friends across the street, my husband found a couple in Southern California who had a small company which manufactured Christmas wreaths from all natural materials. They needed a dependable source of horse chestnuts because most Californians were apparently too savvy to plant trees which required so much yearly clean up. My visionary spouse immediately saw the future–local Utah laborers (our children) becoming the supply-side chain.

Because he was a high school teacher and vastly underpaid, my husband jumped at the chance for a “side jo” and began varying his route to work so that he could map horse chestnut trees in the avenues above the Utah Capitol. Then one lovely fall afternoon, we loaded the kids (the youngest was two at the time), dozens of work gloves, lots of 5 gallon buckets, and a cooler of ice water into our VW van and headed out to make our fortune. The teen-age workers were dubious about this plan, but they knew their father was unlikely to be deterred, so they sighed and went along for the ride.

When we knocked on the door of the first tree owners, they turned out to be elderly and were thrilled that someone wanted to clean up the mess from hundreds of spiny husks and nuts littering their front yard. Every kid was assigned a bucket and gloves (to protect soft fingers from the nasty spines). The younger kids picked up nuts already separated from their shells, and the older ones dealt with the harder to manage nuts still encased in their husks.

We swept through three or four yards that first day. Even the two year-old managed to collect a gallon or so of nuts. My husband was elated! Fame and fortune awaited! But his older children were less thrilled. They threatened revolt unless he agreed to some labor concessions—namely a set payment per cubic foot of saleable nuts. Their father hemmed and hawed. But they didn’t belong to his gene pool for nothing. Eventually he gave in and agreed to a percentage of the profits. Son #4, who was eight at the time, said he remembers his share was about a dollar a cubic foot. (Salaries forty years ago which almost matched the $1 an hour I had made cleaning the Eyring Science Center at BYU from 4 to 7 AM before my Doctrine and Covenants religion class!)

Six weeks later, we had ventured into Provo on the south and Farmington in the north. For two or three afternoons a week we picked up kids after school and harvested horse chestnuts until temperatures and snow stopped us. There were setbacks, including six sons who thought chucking the product at each other was much more entertaining than actual financial accumulation. And bathrooms. Eight kids require a potty nearby. Experience and several unfortunate accidents caused us to choose collection routes within easy access to gas stations. Plus, we could all share a couple of Big Gulps—a huge incentive for kids who weren’t used to casual treats.

It was dirty, sometimes painful work. On any given afternoon at least one child rebelled and refused to lift a finger, much less a horse chestnut. And once we transferred the bounty from the back of the car to the basement laundry area, more work ensued. We earned almost twice as much if the nuts had toothpicks inserted for ease of mounting on the wreaths. So for a couple of hours every night until they were done, my husband put on his transistor headphones and drilled tiny little holes into thousands of nuts. Then one kid or another poked the toothpicks in the holes and stacked the completed products carefully in boxes for mailing. We averaged 20 to 40 CUBIC FEET (did I mention hundreds of thousands?) of horse chestnuts per season for several years. And we profited about a thousand dollars per season. After paying the employees, there still was enough money left to finance most of the Christmas wishes for those same eight workers. (A genius business plan!)

Now days, though they live far apart, my kids get their families together at least a couple of times a year. They organize corn hole competitions, mountain bike, laugh, play dozens of games, show off Traeger recipes, complete family or humanitarian  projects, and celebrate significant events. One of their topics of conversation always includes some good natured complaining about their “difficult” childhoods—when they had to spend so much time working together while they were young. I smile and agree. It hasn’t, however, escaped my notice that their children are suffering the same unfortunate fate. Perhaps some of them have realized that was our plan all along?