i was reading some old english papers today and thought i'd post a couple...so much for doing homework!! here they are.

Summer is never a simple thing; summer is a cascade of events, each causing the next or affected by the last. There are good summers and bad summers and summers that are just in-between. But everyone has a summer that can be referred to as “that” summer. For good reasons or bad, everyone knows about “that summer.”

My “that summer” was started a few weeks before school got out. It was my ninth grade year, and the last one at the junior high. I was all set to have an awesome summer and then get into high school and have fun—pool parties at our neighborhood pool, being able to swim without a lifeguard at the pool…it was all going to happen. One night in May, my parents told my sister and me that they had to talk to us. They were way too serious for good news, and my sister and I were instantly nervous. We all sat in a circle on the floor; my parents were holding hands; they steeled themselves and began.

“Ron let me go today,” my dad said calmly. This didn’t make sense…let him go? As in fired? Why? We asked. “I forgot to run a proposal by him before I sent it to the client, and this is the second time I forgot,” he stated, ashamed and embarrassed. These statements, made ever so calmly, produced a pit in my stomach that I fell through so fast that this new information didn’t even sink in. That night, Dad took me to his office to pack up. The office where I used to go and raid the snack cupboard and print off school assignments and got my first email account. The office that had provided for our family for the past 10 years. We packed it up into our little Mighty Max pickup and left.

The last few weeks of school were dismal, as uncertainty and stress can be. We had to put our house up for sale; the mortgage payments were too big for a family whose only income was that of my mom’s, a seamstress. We had a large house because our family was so large when we moved to Iowa from Utah. I grew up there, but I wouldn’t reach 16 there, I wouldn’t have pool parties or go swimming by myself there. Sure, we didn’t need all the space since I was the only one left at home, but as we looked for a new (for us) and smaller house, I realized how lucky I had been, and how sucky this would be. We cleaned and painted and fixed, trying to keep a good attitude. I hoped so badly that we wouldn’t be able to sell the house—who buys a 40-year-old house with so many bedrooms?—as we hadn’t been able to on previous attempts. In the meantime, we took the 3-hour drive to Nauvoo about every other week to volunteer at the temple open house. Here was solace and peace. During these one or two day vacations, my mind got a break from the turmoil and uncertainty and I got to sit on the portico of the temple, giving service to those thousands of people who got to share in the peace of the temple with me. During this time, prayers were given; we (grudgingly) asked to sell the house; for Dad to find a new job; for hope, and a good attitude. It was working, and all our prayers were answered—eventually. While at Especially for Youth (a church-sponsored youth conference) in June, I got the phone call that we had sold our house. Yay! I said, and Crap! I thought. The catch? We had to be out of the house in three weeks. When I got home from EFY, the craziness began. We started packing in earnest, throwing away all non-essentials, as we would probably be moving to a house less than ½ the size of our current one. Ward members came and helped pack for days at a time. We set up a garage sale to make some money off of our junk, and to get it carried away for free. With the objects we got rid of, memories were tossed out as well. We had to sell the kitchen table and chairs that I had carved pumpkins at and done homework on. My mom had to sell her precious antiques: a Victorian fainting couch; a wooden filing cabinet; a foldout desk; a spinning wheel; an old schoolhouse desk. The long family room couch with the hide-a-bed had to go too, as did the living room and parlor couches. All sold, with memories attached, to people who would never know the treasure trove of stories they had. Sure, furniture is furniture. But memories can make the dingiest chair seem like a throne or the nicest couch seem like a fortress. After we sold the house and while we were scrambling around trying to pack and get rid of things, we had to find a new place to live—in two weeks. We looked at several houses before finding one that seemed nice and big and ready for us to move in. The week before we turned over the memory filled house, we started cleaning and moving into the new one. It was only then that we realized the house wasn’t quite as big and ready as it seemed. The kitchen was 1/5 the size of our old one, and both bathrooms could fit in my parents’ old master bathroom. Both bathrooms also needed remodeling, the kitchen needed painting, all the carpet had to be replaced (especially in my room—it was pink), walls had to be painted, windows needed fixing or replacing—the list went on and on. But our prayers for patience and good attitudes were answered, at least at this point. We sang as we made the house ready to live in, and had fun decorating a new place. The fact that we would soon never go back to the old house had not sunk in. The final day came. The house was empty, and my sister and I decided to sleep there one last time. We put down sleeping bags in the living room, and went to sleep. In the morning, we had one last nostalgia-filled tour. We started in the living room, where we had slept. This was the room where countless nativity plays had been carried out at Christmas; where I had spent hours upon hours practicing on the piano; where I and my friends and siblings had made a fortress out of the couch by inverting the cushions. This was the room that Jon-Jon, the neighbor boy, had written my name on the wall and pretended that I had done it. But now the piano was in the new house, and the couch had been sold, along with the memories it stored, to a woman who could never appreciate what it was. Next to the living room was the dining room. This room was filled with Sunday dinners and birthday parties. Then we went through the sliding pocket door into the kitchen.

The kitchen, as the nucleus of the home, held undoubtedly the most memories. Thousands of cookies had been baked here, many pumpkins carved, and hundreds of friends made. The kitchen is where Joy School had been held. It was where we first put our new, Windows 3.0 computer. My sister and I had had a flour fight here, leaving a fine layer of flour coating all the surfaces in the kitchen, white footprints in the hall and on the trampoline.

Next was the family room, home to Valentine’s, Christmas, and movie parties. The comfy old brown couch was gone, along with the fish tank. Then the parlor, where we had picnics by the fire in the winter, Christmas mornings opening presents, and Family Home Evenings. Soon the realtors came, and turned our house over to someone else.

Don’t get me wrong, we were blessed in this process. The new house was cheap enough that my parents were able to pay off our entire mortgage—and you have to be thankful for the absence of a housing payment when you have practically no income. We also received tons of support from ward members and friends, and the new neighborhood likes us much better than the old did—they were probably glad to see us go, along with our used cars and less-than-perfect back yard. Looking back, I see that this all was an act of God. I was humbled, taught many lessons, and my parents were able to get out from under the financial strain that big old house had been.

The next few months were busy and stressful, spent trying to unpack and remodel while my parents had callings to the Stake Young Women’s presidency and High Council. We also continued with plans made before the event that had set all of this craziness off. I started high school that fall, my mom got a job at Wal-Mart, and my dad looked for a job. It would take my dad a 1 ½ years to get someone to hire him—not many companies see longevity in a 65 year old, regardless of experience. I still drive by the old house at times, and think about the good times I had there. I will always remember the flour fight my sister and I had in the kitchen, and jumping on the trampoline in the back yard in the summer. And I’ll always remember “that summer.”


here's part of another one:
Although I was compelled to write in elementary by my teachers, I am so grateful now that I did write. The younger the mind, the better the imagination—a child’s mind has yet to be restricted by science, history, and experience. Anything can happen in the writings of a 6 year old. The few writings I did that have survived to today are of such value to me because they show me my imagination and personality as a child. One such story that I wrote, “Mr. Chick,” was about a group of baby chickens that conspire against a farmer and scare him away with a blow-up chicken. There was a sequel to that story, complete with a second villain and illustrations. Another story was called “The Ghost,” and it was real fancy because it folded out into the long shape of a ghost. This story was about a poor ghost who tried to scare children as they trick-or-treated, but they outsmarted him. To get them back, he changed himself into a toothbrush, substituted for their teacher in school the next day, and turned them all into apples. A ghost that turns itself into a toothbrush to get revenge on little kids and turns them into apples? The extent of my young mind will never cease to amaze me; some people are able to hold on to their imagination throughout life while still grasping the realities of life, but I have not been able to do that. Since restrictions have been placed on my imagination, these short, funny writings mean the world to me as they bring back memories of a time when I could imagine anything.


good times.