Recast as child and mystic sage

Last night, Alex, his brother Andrew, my sister Katie and I (it was a double date!) saw Persepolis. You must see it if you haven't! We got back to Provo and we built a fire on Utah Lake! I was the usual party pooper for the first bit, skeptical and scared and altogether lame, but I must say, if anyone wants to have a fire out there again, I'm game. Whatever happened to my old, don't-give-a-darn self? I am bringing it back.

My mission call most definitely arrives this week. It is both surreal and very scary. I am signing my life away for 18 months but to a source I trust and love and am so devoted to. My dear friends, I am sitting here crying with fear and faith, with excitement and anxiety. I had no idea how hard this would be, how right everyone was who said it would be hard. I lay in bed last night, thinking about how painfully I miss my dear brother Robert who returns from his mission in August. I won't see him for such a long time. He is my best friend, like all my siblings are to me, and I won't see him for so long. Today is the first day I've actually thought, "No! I don't want to go!" But then I settle down and I remember the feelings I had when I first decided to go and the accompanying confidence and motivation and peacefulness. I think about my future children and how I will be a better mother. I re-read letters sent to me by my dear, best friends who are serving missions right now. They all agree they have never done anything better with their lives. Am I strong enough? Am I faithful enough? Am I qualified enough? Will I be effective? I want to go and I am going to go, and it will only continue to be hard. Difficulty builds character! If I've learned anything in my 22 years of life, it's that. Every time life has delivered some blows, I've risen above and conquered and become even more of the person I want to be. I can't wait to tell you where I'll be serving! Just to know that there is one, single-most important place for me to be is intensely humbling.

My family used to live in a house on Clarkson Court. It was white with blue trim and had a tree that shed little pods all over the place. Our neighbor hated how it encroached on his property and soiled his lawn, so one Saturday, he took out his chainsaw and cut all the branches that passed the property line. Our automatic garage door opener didn't work, so every time we pulled up to the house, my mom would have to get out of our "Mickey Van," as Robert called it, and manually yank the door open. One summer, my dad, a notorious do-it-yourselfer, jackhammered out the concrete walkway and porch and laid a stone one. He dug a well in our backyard and I'm not sure we ever got water out of it. But my earliest memories are in that backyard. One the right side of the yard, Dad built us a gigantic sandbox that doubled as the neighborhood litter box. On the left side, we planted corn and tomatoes, cauliflower, eggplant, brussel sprouts and broccoli, and when harvest time came, we kids would sit among the corn stalks, picking ears of corn wearing nothing but diapers. One day there was a solar eclipse, so Robert and I sat outside and watched it all day with special glasses Mom got us. We were so young. I was no older than four. Another day when Dad was working in the garden--I think it may have been the day he decided to finally lay sod on the barren dirt--Robert and I sat at our fire orange Little Tykes table and ate dirt all day. I had a broken radio antenna that I used to break up the dirt clods. Mom has photos of our feast so I can prove this. I liked to eat things I wasn't supposed to a lot. I ate probably five cans of Play-Dough as a child. To this day I am a sucker for brightly colored foods.

I have been accused of being a romantic before. Being a dreamer or an idealist (though I'm also a renowned cynic--a realist, I say). Maybe I am romanticizing these events to an extent, but really, I don't think I am, because when I'm home with my family and we start reminiscing, our eyes glaze over simultaneously and suddenly we are transported back to Clarkson Court and I am three wearing only a diaper in the corn patch and then I am four and Robert is three and he's running out on the street wearing his underwear on his head and then I am three reading a book about Cinderella and I'm in the hospital with my mom because she just miscarried and then Michael is born and he has to have tubes put in his ears so he can hear and then Katie is a baby sitting in her car seat and I watch her umbilical cord fall out and it's so gross and then Becky and I put Robert's curly locks into pigtails and then we are wearing our matching Minnie Mouse shirts and our parents are tucking us into our bunkbeds that Papa Walter made and after they leave the room we laugh about how Becky made me steal baby Robert's bottle from him while he napped in his crib wearing the neon green Batman sunglasses he stole from Orchard Supply Hardware because he didn't know it was wrong.

I would never go back and do this again because it could never be done as well. But I can't wait to do it when I am in my Mom's shoes.

And lastly...