Bamma's Book Club

Last week I started Bamma's Book Club.

We have a couple of reluctant readers in our group. I suppose those are the ones I'm targeting the most, but really I want them all to read.

• I printed up a couple of pages of favorite books for each age and asked them to help me make the list longer
• I brought out favorite books from my shelf that their mother and father loved
• I told them I'd pay them each $10 for one finished book during a month
• I offered the $10 to their parents as well

For the 3-7 year olds the money seems like a lot. For the 10-12 year olds the money seems like a nice perk. For the 14-year-old the money isn't incentive enough to spend time reading.

I know a 7-year-old and a 12-year-old have already finished their book for the month. We'll let you know what happens with everybody else.

Bambi's relatives

I live in a well established neighborhood with all the usual cars and trucks and families. Deer live here, too. This is a mountain side, but still I am surprised after all this civilization time that the deer really live here in our midst.

For the past month or so I've been aware that a mother deer lives in the thicket of oak brush just across a busy street. This year she has twin babies. Two small replicas of herself with dappled backs that look like the sunlight pours onto them through the trees even when they are out of the thicket.


She must have kept them hidden for weeks, because they already have a bit of size to them. What is it about two of them that makes them so much more intriguing? In fact, yesterday, just happening to look out my front window, I see the mother and both fawns cross the street and linger on our side to feed on the neighbor's grass. They are so beautiful that the next two cars come to a complete stop just to look at them. I see the passengers in the cars pointing and talking and being sure little people within see them, too.

When the resident deer eat my tulips to the ground, leave droppings across my yard, bound through my pristine snowscapes, I sometimes think they are a nuisance. But when I see two babies with lengthening adolescent legs back and forth from the thicket to the yards I worry about that busy street and the cars that whiz up and down this hill will someday intersect. I hope not.

In the balance of things I am grateful for their presence, their beauty, their promise. I hope they stay.

Family Reunion

We go to Beaver to the Family Reunion, gathering together on my father's mountain as we have for nearly 40 years. This year, for most of us, it is a night or two under the pines. Other years it has been several days.


Only four of us siblings remain--our mother dead more than 45 years, our father gone from us 6 years now, our sweet stepmother most recently departed 4 years ago, our other two sisters gone 17 years and 61 years. The other four of us are there, two brothers, two sisters, and some of each of our descendants down to third and fourth generations.


Everything is just as my father would have ordered it. Weather with bright clear summer skies, a snowbank nearby for making ice cream, a view of DeLano with green velvet growing right to the top, the double bare peaks of Baldy behind, deer wandering close enough to show the smallest child up close, wildflowers blooming all across the meadows in yellows and pinks and blues. We are above 10,000 feet here, nestled in the heart of these magnificent mountains where we spent summer evenings growing up, always connected with being together as a family.


This place makes me. . .makes me. . .think of my father. This place exemplifies his giving to us much of what he knew mattered most. Family, relationships, independence, learning to live on the land, all surrounded with his high respect for nature and beauty and wildness, and animals, and the God who created it all for us. . .for us! We are most blessed.


The highlight--outside the several side conversations with this niece or that nephew--is the Saturday midday meal and the family meeting that follows. This year the food is terrific. My father said   when you eat on the mountain the food is always terrific. The meeting is interesting, each family reporting  on each descendant, catching up on what is happening, who is struggling, who is triumphing.


Strangely, this year the world intrudes. The Sheriff's Department comes to tell us to be careful on the roads on Saturday. It seems they are holding a long distance bike race--some 70 miles--from downtown Beaver, up the mountain, over the hill down to the other side then coming along the road by us here on Big Flat and finishing  at the ski resort a couple of miles down the canyon. What? The Tours de Beaver?


Later in the afternoon, as we leave, we pass several of those bikers with their beautiful bikes, professional bike suits, and protective helmets. Amazing. I look at them as we pass them and wonder what drives someone to do that kind of hard thing.

I come away cheering, really, grateful for this family in spite of our particular foibles. Mostly grateful for the fine growing upness I see in young people, grateful for the steadfastness of those a bit more mature, the presence of everyone who chooses to come to be together, glad for our parents who loved this place. Blessings.

Elsa's book

When each grandchild turns 5, they can write their first book with me. Elsa is grandchild number eight, and her book is at the printer as we speak. One more book to go, Liesel turns 4 in September.

The process is delightful. First we talk about what the author-child want to write about. Sometimes I have to encourage in a specific way because of the season, or the setting, or the possible characters.

Next the author-child tells me the story while I capture it in the computer. Along the way I ask questions like, "Why didn't Peter Pan want to grow up?" or "What does a gooey goo look like?" They always know the answers to my questions and I incorporate that into the story.

Then we take pictures. The author-child is always the main character and siblings, cousins, and sometimes parents are the other characters. The author-child also draws pictures of the characters.

Then it is time for me to choose and PhotoShop the photographs, color in the drawings, and enter it all into Quark or InDesign. Ah, the marvels of technology.

I used to print my own copies on an InkJet printer. I had to spray the pages with hairspray-like protectant, realizing little children sometimes turn pages with saliva-soaked fingers. Then I found a local printer who uses a big press with excellent color that doesn't run and I now hire him to print and cut the pages.

In my workshop in the basement I bind as many copies of the book as I want (other grandparents love to get copies) and I deliver the book in a wrapped-up package to the author-child. Oh, the joy of having your very own book that you wrote.

The Princess and the Frog

Here is a peek at Elsa's cover picture. Hope you like it.

Yay! A Project Finished

More than 30 years ago I began writing Tula, a story about growing up in Beaver, Utah. I used an electric typewriter and worked a whole summer on developing different adventures for Tula every day. Way led on to way, life happened, we moved, and with one thing and another, laid Tula aside.


Three years ago, in the summer of 2008, I went searching for Tula in the file, the boxes, the carryall. Couldn't find her. But I did find notes of subjects I wrote about as well as a list of others I intended to write about. So I broke them out and set to seriously writing about Tula again.


That summer I went to a writers' conference and came away eager to return to Tula and her adventures.  Almost a year later I had 100,000 words which I passed out to a few friends who graciously read them, responded quite positively, but were certainly not jumping up and down for joy.


I wasn't far enough along to seek publication and had to set Tula aside again because of commitments I made to a year-and-a-half project abroad.


In August of 2010 I returned and picked up Tula. With my computer and a shorter wait in between, she was easier to find this time. I poured over all 100,000 words and found her dull, uninteresting, downright boring. No wonder my friends had not been greatly enthusiastic! I wasn't either.


A few weeks later I decided--against all advice from the writers' conference--to change Tula's point of view from third person to first person. Suddenly she came alive.


The work was just like starting over. Changing point of view isn't just adjusting the verbs. It is insights, feeling, fears, hopes, dreams, as well as conversations and  relationships. Working nearly every day it took me almost 8 months to get Tula into first person.


That's the project finished this week.


All eight months of rewriting I knew she was stronger, more interesting, more delightful.


Just to check out my thinking I farmed the finished manuscript out to four friends to read. The reviews were positive, delightful, "couldn't put it down" types of comments. I wanted to dance like Snoopy on his doghouse!


This time I'm moving on to the next step. No matter what else happens, I learned a great deal more about writing and I finished! That makes the whole thing sweeter this time.


Hurrah for finishing!

Sunday Dinner

I set the table for Sunday dinner thinking of the hundreds of Sundays gone before. Today I choose a cloth of white and plates I bought in England's Cotswolds at a factory once. I lugged them home in the backpack I carried onto the airplane. The glassware I place above each knife is stemmed and coppery colored, inherited from my grandmother who gave them to my father. I choose them after he died and we survivors go through cupboards dividing up things beautiful with memories.

I love these Sundays when the whole family comes to dinner. My quiet place will come alive with grown-up voices talking of this and that and with children's voices playing with cousins. For a time we will join together over food I have prepared to catch up, to exclaim, to discuss. No longer do I provide food to keep my children alive. They are all perfectly capable of doing their own providing these days. I provide to keep connections--this parent to my children, this grandparent to my grandchildren, brother and sister to each other, children to aunts and uncles. I hope to provide a constant way to reach out to one another across our various lives to remember, to create, to meld relationships into eternal links.

Sunday dinner seems insignificant for such an important goal. As I said to a friend some years ago, these days I find my self spectating more and matriarching less. In my children's busy lives in the middle of raising children themselves my role has changed. It can't be termed either bad or good, just changed. So I seek for crossroads where we--in such different stages, all of us--can touch, see each other, care (however briefly), and be glad.

And I wonder, as I look around the table, which of these grandchildren will someday inherit my grandmother's coppery-colored stemware and think of her,their great-great grandmother who brought them to our family. And be glad.

Making Rugs

I go to Beaver for a day. Back to the place I was born and grew up and where our family home stands empty and alone since the deaths of my father and sweet stepmother. I go with my saintly sister, who lived here fulltime to care for my aging parents the last six years of their lives.

We drive down Main Street because Genene has told me the incredible news, Beaver has a stoplight! I must see it for myself, test myself on the stopping and waiting at the Post Office corner just to see that the lights go from red to green to red just like they do everywhere else.

We drive by my father's house on 600 East just to see. The dozen or so apple trees in the yard are a riot of pink and white blossoms, promising a harvest of plenty in a few months. If it doesn't freeze again. It has snowed on us this late May day all the way from Kanosh. Oh, Dad, you would love to see these trees so beautifully blooming. Even in the snow.

Our destination today is to the home of an old friend. He has offered to help me learn to make rugs. We traipse through the snow with my basket of colors sewn into strips an inch and a half wide. Downstairs into the basement we go where the loom is waiting for us. This is not just any loom. This is a memory of my childhood. For many years this loom stood in a room in our church basement waiting, strings strung, for any ward member who wanted to bring their leftover fabric to make rugs. Some of my earliest memories are of playing at my mother's feet as she passed the shuttle back and forth, pounded the rows of fabric together, and produced swaths of color that lessened the winter cold of the linoleum floor in my bedroom, or softened my standing at the sink to wash dishes.

I am amazed as I see the loom that it is much smaller than my child eyes remember.

I choose a stiff yellow fabric to begin. We wrap three or four shuttles with the long strips, choose a deep green for an accent stripe and we begin. It's simple really, with just a bit of instruction I get the hang of moving the two pedals up and down that switch the strings above or below so the weaving occurs. Pound, pound, pound with the bar between each pass of the shuttle and the stiff yellow fabric begins to take rug shape. Oh, it is beautiful. I learn to place a stretcher bar across the top of the work so the width of the rug stays even. I realize the pedal needs to be down on the side I start the shuttle from. I work blisters on three fingers of my right hand by the pounding and the muscle in my forearm begins to ache. No matter, the rug takes shape.

In a couple of hours I have completed the first rug. A break for a late lunch and I begin the second one. Pink and blue for this one. The lightness of the fabric makes the rug not so thick. More delicate. A rug, delicate?

As the afternoon wears on I make mistakes, breaking strings with the stretcher bar that takes all of us to fix so the rug holds together. I see my sister solve problems to make something work just like Dad used to do. A gift I admire. Solving problems.

By late afternoon I have made two rugs that are curled around the loom underneath. A rug always needs to stay on the loom to hold a starting place for the next one. We will return in a couple of weeks to work again. But today, we must leave to get home before dark. The snow has turned to driving rain all the way home to Provo. But I am filled with thinking about making things with my hands, turning leftover fabric into useful things of beauty, and memories of home.