I Love the Mountains: July 2023

“Oh, What Do You do in the Summertime?”

Dear family and dear friends, 12 July 2023

June disappeared. July is nearly half over! Do you think that heaven is hastening its time? What have we loved as sunshine has held our hearts?

A daughter and family ran after the sunshine and her children with in lands of warmth and adventure.

Laurene and Val chase one another to find rainbows and sunbursts behind a building on a Bountiful hill on Friday mornings early, early.

(Can you see the rainbow? And what brilliance are you finding in unexpected growth in your yard?)

We are learning to like racing heat in early morning weed-pulling, appreciating moisture in clouds and along the wayside in walks with mothers and finding time to garden and refresh wishing wells with grandchildren and lifting a shovel and a hoe to help their 93-and-a-half-year-old great grandmother.

What have you found satisfying?

Sometimes for us, it is simply making colors match in a drawer or basket, listening to vacation stories of others, participating in the legislative process (how do you feel about keeping a King James Bible on elementary school shelves?) Grateful, we are, to live in a land where it is possible to offer personal voice.

Grateful to follow grandchildren to a park to celebrate flag day.

Privileged we were to accompany grandchildren and daughter to a Saratoga Springs Open House, a sister in helping honor our revered Aunt Lorraine, who passed in February on her 97^th birthday.

Grateful to be invited by a youngest brother to travel to Paris (Idaho) to commemorate 30 years together at the pioneer house that we visited as newlyweds, vacuuming, dusting and preparing to receive extended family and friends; later to find a peaceful Paris hillside cemetery and tour a tabernacle.

Grateful to follow a Wyoming highway past Star Valley to view a truly Grand Teton National Park, to make friends traveling from the Holy Land, to ferry through dark clouds and storm across Jenny Lake,

then meander memory lane past Driggs to Idaho Falls, Shelley, Firth and Pocatello, Idaho, locating the building where my grandpa worked, hugging a cousin who kindly drove to the outskirts of a small cemetery to walk us to Grandma Lucille Rowbury Hillman’s grave.

Val learned as a child it is good to arrive early and return early. Good practice! An early return to Kaysville afforded a day at a Salt Lake Library for us to look in the book section to discover more about my mom’s growing up area and whet Val’s thirst for clues about his Starkey kin in Benton Township, Hocking County, Ohio, in the 1800s. Tear came Sunday when he discovered that his 6^th great grandfather Frederick Starkey served in the Revolutionary war. Family History library hosts pointed us to a scavenger hunt and an “escape room,” where we learned with grandchildren days later that everyone’s gifts are needed to solve our puzzles. We escaped with 50 seconds to spare, in time to hear Tabernacle organist Richard Elliot play “Come, Come Ye Saints” and “Danny Boy” on the tabernacle organ.

After exploring part of the church history library, where children tried their hand at transcribing ancient metal plates (ink quill dipping included, William attaining a speed faster than Oliver Cowdrey. Go William!)

we were invited to see newly created “wheels” at the base of the Salt Lake temple designed to shift with any quaking of earth.

Yes, quaking will come. However, as we gather to appreciate neighbor's weddings and chickens,

and "liberty in law" as our country boasts a birthday of nearly 250 years, we learn to cherish independence, interdependence, wholesome recreation, music, and lights in a night sky.