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Langston Hughes published a poem about his ancestors: The night is beautiful, So the faces of my people. The stars are beautiful, So the eyes of my people. Beautiful, also, is the sun. Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people. Mr. Hughes was referencing his slave ancestors, but I find it applicable to anyone’s set of people. With the girls returning to BYU to continue with their education, there has been a lot of moaning and sadness about heading back to Utah.  I can’t say that I blame them.  Back in the day, I pretty much hated living in Provo when John and I were students there.  We felt extremely isolated, living among people who only socialized with their own kind, namely their families.  There would be a mass exodus every holiday and on special weekends when young couples left Provo to go stay at the nearby palatial and loving homes of their parents.  With the advent of 30 years of time between then and now, I think that the gap between non-...

There is some freakishly weird connection between Glo, and John and me.  I think it comes from having three solid years at home with us and without siblings, and from spending every summer with me at Interlochen.  She is so much a part of our lives that we definitely get on each other nerves occasionally (!), but I kind of can't imagine my life without her.  She has watched every movie we have watched (much to the surprise of her siblings--Silence of the Lambs, Insidious) and has been on just about every trip we have ever taken. This summer, she has had to make a major life adjustment by living and working in Michigan.  She can't remember a time when we didn't live in Pennsylvania, and State College is a pretty basic town with one major road.  It's very different here in Southeast Michigan. Even though we still live in the country, the surrounding area is a major city with rush hour, and traffic, and lots of people.  She has needed to become familiar with...

This past spring, John and I were called to be temple workers in the Detroit Michigan temple.  I served as a temple worker many years ago in the Frankfurt Germany temple, but that assignment, because we lived almost four hours away from the temple, was a monthly one, and looking back on it, I'm not sure the German temple workers there ever really took me seriously :-) Let me tell you something about temple work:  it is greatly romanticized!  People who find out we are temple workers make comments like "oh, how wonderful", or "I wish I could serve in the temple" or "it must be so spiritual".  While I'm sure those moments will come, working in the temple is just that--it's WORK!  Oh my gosh, it is SO much work.  In fact, sometimes I'd like to claim the same age-hindering pains that force my co-workers to sit down as much as possible, because after a couple of hours, it's all I want to do! John and I met with a member of the presid...

This year, John and I were asked to be "Pa" and "Ma" for the youth conference of the Ann Arbor Stake.  I'm not exactly sure who submitted our names, but I do wonder if new people are chosen because they simply have no idea what they are getting into! We should have seen the warning sign that it might be slightly disorganized when it was a week before youth conference was to begin, and we had basically received no information about anything.  We knew that we would be in charge of a "family" consisting of 8-15 kids, that we would be camping, and that we were in charge of a Family Home Evening activity one night.  That was it. Being planner me, it wasn't easy having little to no information or guidance, but I did my best, getting together some swag for our numberless group of kids, preparing an FHE (not really knowing how long it was to be or what was expected), and John raided our long-lost camping equipment, bringing anything and everything, not...