I Love the Mountains: Anticipate Rhythms!

Dear family and dear friends,

I had a letter prepared 14 January 2025. Then Life Happened. Here we are in February. Here is last month's letter. Soon I will add a Valentine message honoring a sweetheart sister, who lived 65 remarkable years to teach me about love.

Happy Valentine month!

January's note:

My whole life, the words of my mother seem to have an echo: “Increase your options.”

"Let so and so be so and so."

“Anticipate rhythms!"

The rhythm one is getting me. A niece posted this past year about revolving around the sun 34 times. How is your journey going? In quiet moments, I join a remarkable daughter who is single handedly raising teens, “How today will I “improve the shining moments”? In what way today can I effectively “scatter sunshine”?

A sunshine scattering Grandma, Val’s mom, celebrated a 95th birthday with her twin in late December.

And one of our Seattle families drove 900 miles to celebrate this occasion with us.

What a glorious round of fun, we had!

Day one began with efforts to rally with a brother and family to tidy our mom’s home.

The effort was magnanimous. And appreciated. A neighbor reminded us recently, material things grow to be peripheral, when focus centers on stewardship. Some items, however, drip memories to “please the eye and gladden the heart!”

Some of them fit. Some of them do not. The question—which gifts (or promises) will be used today to bless "families of the earth"? In a lightbulb moment early one morning, I wondered about fitting blankets into the deacon’s bench upon which Val proposed to me.

Voila! They fit! What??!! A dying blanket bin landed at the thrift store. And in the process of tidying the room with the bench, a little white slip sailed to the floor. In “turning aside to see,” the white slip revealed a poem Shirley had written at age 15, about the passing of her mother when she was just over a year old, called “Death:”

I believe she won a county prize for the poem. It would have been close to the time Shirley found a trunk in the attic with the diary of her deceased mother, who had written each day to detail her next to last year of high school, where she met her sweetheart, Floyd. (It was this year that she returned to school after a year helping her mother with newborn twins as the eldest daughter of 13. Lucille came back and graduated top of the class.) Treasures of time.

Val’s joy, after enjoying grandchildren and a helpful-in-home-repair visiting son, has been researching great grandparents, Martha and Milton, who relocated from a farm in Illinois in 1916.

County court records and scouting brought us to acreage behind a fire station in Farr West, Utah. Note the multiple lines. Multiple purchases. Facing brilliant white-crested peaks, our question:

What would a move across the United States have felt like in 1916? How would Martha (as a woman) have felt in purchasing acres and acres of farmland, to finally peer out her windows and be greeted by mountains rather than prairie?