There never was a question where our family’s Christmas tree would come from. Continue reading
In the spring of 1941, my family moved from Pocatello into the first of three houses we were to occupy over several years in Mackay.
I was four years old and had three older brothers named Johnie, Eddie, and Gene, and a younger sister Hazel, who was one-and-a- half. In each of the three houses, the arrival of four boys was soon followed by trouble. Continue reading
My mother had a way with plants, and her flowers were a summer-long frenzy of color.
She always planted daylilies, their long stems holding up orange clumps of color to the height of car windows passing by the southwestern corner of our Boise property. This was one-half of a block of land my folks bought in 1947, when I was two. The block was a garden and cow pasture owned by a Mr. Quarbridge, who had never developed it. Continue reading
In the corner of the dilapidated laundromat sat an old-fashioned soda pop machine filled with our favorite bottles of carbonated beverages.
We didn’t have money to buy those sugary treats but we figured out how to outsmart the machine with a small bottle opener and a long paper straw. It was easy. Pop the cap off, stick the straw in, and sip. This was our little secret, which we never told anyone. We thought we were being inventive, and it never once occurred to us that we were stealing from the company that sold the soda. Continue reading
The alluring aroma of chocolate wafts through the house as I pull a chocolate chip cake from the oven. I don’t pretend to be a great cook, yet my chocolate chip cake is a dangerous enough confection to topple kingdoms.
A lightly chocolate oatmeal cake smothered in melted chocolate chips and walnuts, it’s moist and slightly springy, not at all like the dry, sterile offerings that begin in a box. Even so-so cooks like me can have a few moments of glory in the cooking hall of fame. Continue reading
My heart pounded as the line of newly arrived passengers filed around the corner. I glanced back at my five children clutching their homemade welcome signs. Their attention was focused on the people coming in. I turned back. Where is he? I stood on my tiptoes for a better view.
At last, I saw his head come into view at the back of the line. I recognized him immediately. Artem Chukanov, our seventeen-year-old exchange student from Russia with whom we’d spent the last month emailing, messaging, and video conferencing. “There he is!” I called out, and we all waved. He saw us and a huge smile spread across his face. The moment he stepped free of the crowd, my daughter Sage ran and hugged him. He hugged her back and we all took turns greeting him with a hug. It was nice to finally hear him say, “Hi, Mom!” in person.
There are times when you know you have to do something. You don’t know why or how—you just know. For me, getting an exchange student was one of those times. The idea surfaced almost a year before Artem came to live with us. I didn’t think it would ever happen, so I didn’t tell anybody, but the idea wouldn’t go away. Months later, my oldest daughter Shaydell called me from school begging me to come talk to a student exchange representative. I agreed. That was June 9, 2013. On the 18th, Shaydell and I read Artem’s profile and application for the first time. I was impressed by his English and his fun and expressive essays. He wrote, “I want visit Halloween,” and drew a tiny jack-o-lantern between the lines. At the end of his letter to his future host family he wrote, “America, wait for me!!!!!!!” I laughed aloud at all the exclamation points.
I took Artem’s application home and showed my son, whose room Artem would have to share. He was open to the idea, so the last hurdle was my husband. I had no idea what he would say, and was amazed when he responded, “Actually, I’ve thought about that before.” By July 10, we finished our application process and saw our first picture of Artem. I remember thinking, He doesn’t look Russian. This was the first of many misconceptions I had about the Russian people.
One morning in 1998, while I was out in the yard irrigating the lawn, I heard, then saw, a couple of loose boards on the back fence begin to rattle and shake.
It worried me for a moment, because I thought it might have been our newest family member, Niki the cat, who was outside with me and who we hope can be taught to stay in our yard. However, Niki was occupied for the moment with her exploration of the raspberry patch, so I called out toward the moving fence, “Somebody there?”
“Just me,” returned a male voice, and the boards parted to reveal a friendly face I didn’t recall having seen before.
The gray-haired gentleman who belonged to the face didn’t introduce himself, nor did I. We each knew who the other was. He and his wife had lived in the house beyond that fence—a house no more than eighty feet from ours—for a number of years before my wife and I moved to Caldwell in 1980, yet the truth is that my neighbor and I had never met.
Imagine that: living eighty feet away from someone for nearly eighteen years and never having seen him. I suppose if the boards hadn’t come loose because of errant irrigation water having rotted out a two-by-four along the fence’s base, it could easily have been another eighteen years.
We stood talking to each other through the gap for a few minutes, agreed to “get together sometime soon” to do a little fence mending, and then let the boards close again, separating us and our yards. Continue reading
In the creaky limbs of our family memories, a wide rectangle of gray canvas stretches between two tall and spindly lodgepole pines. It is a simple hammock, slung between the same two trees every year, just a few yards from the front porch of the cabin that my great-grandfather built in Island Park in the 1950s. He farmed potatoes in the summer around the tiny town of Teton, and drove a school bus in the winter. He built this cabin in the forest near the headwaters of the Henry’s Fork to make a family retreat for his three daughters and, over time, for their families. I am part of the fourth generation to come to the cabin. Over the two decades of my growing-up years, it was our family’s destination for every summer vacation, and the hammock was its emblem.
The cabin still stands now, some sixty years later, but most of us visit it much less frequently, as our lives have spread us in different directions and obligations across the map. The hammock is hung less often now, and it’s not even the same hammock, although no one knows when or how the original one finally succumbed to our weight, or if perhaps it just got misplaced when it was tucked away at the end of some summer season.
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The homesteaded ranches of my family and Juliet’s family lay north of Arling and south of the Gold Fork River, divided by the demilitarized zone of Highway 55.
Our families were perpetuating a feud that extended back to our paternal grandfathers in the 1940s. Very little was said of the feud in my family, but it was understood that “something had happened” long ago to cause deep alienation, resulting in both families never mingling in public or private, and with others in the community expected occasionally to take sides. My older brother once brought Juliet’s older cousin home to meet my grandparents, and after he had returned her across the ranch border, he was severely chastised for bringing a Finnish girl—a “ferner”—onto our turf.
I had first learned of Juliet when she showed up at my grade school one year in the 1950s, visiting a cousin. A cute, brown-eyed girl with pigtails in a black and red-checked jumper and white blouse, she immediately stood out among the girls in my fifth-grade class. “She’s Matt and Flora’s niece, Howard and Ethel’s daughter. She lives in Utah and is visiting,” a knowing classmate told me.
Attracted immediately, I tried to converse with the visiting girl but had no luck. A year later, I heard she was visiting another cousin in Donnelly. I was intrigued and thought perhaps I could meet her. Perhaps she remembered me from her school visit. I concocted an excuse to visit the house where she was staying, took my trusty binder with holiday cards to the front door and asked if her cousin, old enough to be her aunt, would like to order some. When I saw Juliet walking through the living room I tried to say hello, but her cousin asked her to proceed to the kitchen where she was making cupcakes. Shortly after this, I was encouraged to go home; her cousin had no interest in buying greeting cards.
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