A Sundance Weekend

May 8-12


For Christmas this year, I gave Dad a photographic workshop anyplace he chose. After much Internet shopping, he landed on a workshop by Nevada Weir, a gifted photographer from Santa Fe, New Mexico, who specialized in shooting people in remote locations all over the world. She has worked for National Geographic and other noted magazines. I had planned on staying home from this event so that I could be at Mariah's show of Les Mis a couple more times, but when I went to get tickets online, they were all sold out! So after he had only been gone for a day, Dad called me and asked if I couldn't join him in Utah and fly out the next morning. That way I would be able to be at Emily Proctor's wedding and see Rachel, Jeremy, JJ, Julie, Dave (and Audrey) and Mom Proctor for Mother's Day. It seemed quite serendipitous to take off on a whim like that, but I left the next morning, Rachel picked me up at the airport and took me to Rosemary and Kent's and then they took me on down to Sundance. What a slice of delight. When I walked in the cabin at Sundance with its woodsy smell and views of pine trees and snow-capped mountains, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I am such a woodsy girl and I told Dad immediately, "Someday, I need to have a cabin where all the family can come and where I can retreat and write."

The time at Sundance was a creative feast that reached deep down into my secret soul and stirred its embers. I wanted to think and live creatively rather than by the task. Creativity takes time and trust of your self, and Nevada said, "You have to work it and work it." Yes. You have to be carried along with your sense of play to continue at something until its secrets begin to yield themselves to you. There in the mountains, I felt the permission to do just that. It is the happiest sense, almost like feeling the Spirit, to be waking your sleeping, ancient being. It is like the wise part of yourself that is roused to wakefulness.


We visited with Grandma and hugged all of the relatives and saw many old friends at Emily's wedding. We also had a feast at Rachel's house to celebrate Mother's Day. She had the Tomsick's over as well as Julie and Dave, and as always, made it a lovely, gourmet experience. Jeremy did much of the cooking to celebrate the day!

Here is a picture of Dad loving Grandma. Some of the best parts of Dad I attribute directly to her, so I always tell her that though I don't see her every day, every day she blesses my life.


Rachel, JJ and Jeremy are so cute together--and she is already expecting number two in this picture (and will spend the next several months buying and paying for this one with much sickness.)
I think Julie is trying to hide in this picture! Come out and show Audrey to the world.




Very handsome, JJ. Love that haircut. Rachel got wild with the scissors, so JJ got a buzz.

Infected

Sometimes it seems that the faster you run, the further you fall behind. We have really struggled for many months over one technical problem after another with Meridian, and last Thursday we hit the jackpot. We were invaded by a worldwide SQL injection Trojan out of China that has infected the entire site. It has infected no less than 15 million pages on the web, and we were unfortunately one of those. Tonight we took Meridian down, temporarily, while we work frantically to disinfect our site, but it is a very difficult, time-consuming job, and I don't know how many days it will take. In all the years we've run Meridian, we've never had a problem like this, and well, I'd love to hear anything cheerful that anybody has to say. We're just a bit ground down tonight.

Sisters Weekend April 30-May 4th

All the sisters, except Janette, gathered in Virginia the first weekend in May to enjoy each other, talk girl talk, and see Mariah's play. Rachel surprised us each with aprons she had made for Mother's Day, and Angie shared her facial secrets. We felt quite beautiful. I felt like I had died and gone to heaven to have all these women I love under one roof for three days with nothing more to do than shop for green purses, pledge to eat healthy and then indulge in ice cream cones, and in Laura and Rachel's case, talk until 3 a.m. in bed in the green room.
Our toes are quite creative after our pedicures. Can you tell whose foot is whose?Dad and Truman brought us Boston Market to satisfy a long-held craving of Julie's. A goose on Burke Lake wanted to join the party, but we weren't sharing.

We had a shower for Julie and our new little Audrey at Milli's. Angie gave Julie a basket full of the best of the best products for baby.I love all of these girls.
Rachel didn't know at our sister's weekend that she is expecting too. (not two).The best half-time entertainment our soccer game has ever had. Mariah plays an old woman in Les Mis, wanting to buy Fantine's hair.

Les Mis was wonderful.

Mariah plays a great drunk. She really throws herself into the part.

Dad has wanted this picture for his computer screensaver.

New York, New York

April 19th and 20th

We had such a rich trip to New York City and packed so much into 48 hours it seemed like we had had a world of experience. Our Saturday morning drive was through a sunlit world that seemed the quintessence of spring, with that first fresh green and flowering trees and shrubs gracing every turn. We listened to a new Tabernacle Choir CD, Called to Serve, on the way which was packed with Mack Willberg arrangements and I cried for the beauty of it all, washing off my eye makeup and having to resort to sunglasses to hide the mess.

Our handy, new GPS on the Prius led us to the South Street seaport office of TKS where we bought two tickets for Lion King from a scalper who both lied to us and overcharged us. However, we were in too good of spirits to be bothered for long. We found a new book called The Island at the Center of the World, which is about America's lost colony--the Dutch who settled Manhattan. Apparently 20,000 pages of manuscript have been stashed away untranslated in a library in Albany for these hundreds of years and translation began on them only a few decades ago. This has opened up an entirely new world of the Dutch who first settled that land--and is compelling to me because our Van Couwenhouven relatives were among those, and now we have cleaned the musty window into their world. Checking the index of the book, I found the name of one direct line grandfather listed several times. I can't wait to dig into this book.

Scot and I went to The Bodies exhibit and then to check into the Edison Hotel where we were to spend the night. This will become our new constant in New York because it is right in the heart of Broadway. We went to Ellen's Stardust Diner for dinner, home of the singing "wait staff" where broadway hopefuls alternately slung fries and burgers and grabbed the mike to wow us with their voices that were too good for a diner. Then it was on to Lion King, where I kept dozing off. Allergies really drain my energy as if someone has opened a spigot on my vital energies.

Sunday we grabbed a cab and headed for the Manhattan Ward, which meets on a lower floor of the temple. To our surprise, however, we were there for stake conference where I was moved again by the Spirit by a wonderful talk by the stake president. He related the story of reluctantly being involved in a service project one Saturday morning delivering food for those in need in the ward. He was pretty efficient, deftly avoiding a long conversation with a woman who seemed bent on it. But he told her he had much left to deliver for the "service project" and then was stung that he had been so callous to objectify her that way.

Right after Church we went to Carnegie Hall where the wind blew chill while we waited for Michaela to arrive. Here are pictures of her singing there and hugging us after. Her group sang the Mass of the Child by John Rutter, which was moving and beautiful.

Michaela's group sang:

Little lamb, who made thee?

Dost thou know who made thee,

Gave thee life, and bade thee feed

By the stream and o’er the mead;

Gave thee clothing of delight,

Softest clothing, wooly, bright;

Gave thee such a tender voice,

Making all the vales rejoice?

Little lamb, who made thee?

Dost thou know who made thee?

Little lamb, I’ll tell thee;

Little lamb, I’ll tell thee:

He is called by thy name,

For He calls Himself a lamb,

He is meek, and He is mild,

He became a little child;

I a child, and thee a Lamb,

We are called by His Name.

Little lamb, God bless thee!

Little lamb, God bless thee!

Hard to Take Care of Myself

Dad often says to me that I need to learn to take care of myself and honestly assesses that I don’t always do a good job of that. Every morning he hands me my vitamins and Lipitor (to reduce my soaring cholesterol) and wonders when I will actually do that on my own. It is his constant influence that keeps me going to the gym every morning. Though I love that freshness that fills and revitalizes my body when I’ve exercised, the great temptation is to jump to work every morning to “get more done.” He says to me regularly, “I want you to live and live and live and live.” This is a takeoff of something his great, great grandmother Amanda Hagle Sweeten used to say to his great, great grandfather, Robert Sweeten. She thought he was not industrious enough and that she had to take up some of the slack, and so she said to him, “When I die, Robert Sweeten, I hope you live and you live and you live and you live.” (She did and he did.) I assume this was because she thought it would be helpful for him to have to take care of himself.

Of course, Dad’s take off, from this statement is just the reverse. He wants me to live and be healthy to be with him, and I want to as well. The challenge is making a life-giving routine for my body because it takes time and patience. It is easy for me to be diligent about work—to bore in like a heat-seeking missile toward a job that needs to be done. It is much harder to inculcate a healthy routine into every day, because routines demand time and dedication and some mind share and my mind is already entirely infatuated with the fun projects I am about. It is really hard for me to drink enough water and hard for me to be self-disciplined about my eating habits because I’m really preoccupied with a thousand other things that are far more interesting to me, and things that are shouting out, “Do me now.”

But Dad never gives up, and today as I am finished dressing and ready to run to do something I think is vital, he will stop me and hand me a fistful of supplements and bring me a glass of water and say, “I want you to live and live and live.”

Goodbye Suburban

From Google earth, you can see our red Suburban parked in the driveway, but as of last week, we ended an era in our family life. Twenty years of Suburban ownership came to an end as our friend, Clint Todd, who bought the car, came and picked it up and took it away. It runs like a dream and still looks like new, but now with Mariah heading off to school in the fall, it has become a dinosaur for us.

You can whiff Mariah’s going in the very air around here. She has designated a bed by the window on the second floor of one of the Heritage Halls and checks every day to see who her roommates will be. (She listed herself as “somewhat tidy” and is in a room with roommates who call themselves “tidy”, so already the year will shape up to be a new experience.) She has registered for all of her classes, and everyday she checks the BYU website. I find myself now saying to Mariah, things like, “When you are on your own, you must remember…” There are any number of completions to that sentence. “You must remember to leave your bathroom surfaces empty so you can wipe down and clean up quickly.” “You must remember to reduce things to a routine, so you know what day of the week you always wash your clothes.”

We have loved the Suburban lately because we like to stick our bikes on the back and go down for a ride at Burke Lake, or we throw camping gear in the back and head to the Shenendoah’s for a camping trip. But mostly, it has been a liability. At 12 miles to the gallon, we have been pouring money into Saudi Arabia to help maintain al Qaida. It is miserable to drive downtown to Washington DC because it is hard to parallel park a car when you really can’t see the rear end. We started to notice that nobody wanted to drive the Suburban anywhere. Our shiny red car became the vehicle of last choice, so we shed it and bought a Prius. At 45 miles to the gallon we breeze by the gas stations with arrogance, thinking, we don’t need you today. It is small, makes a U-turn on a dime, and with its fancy GPS guides us easily to all the new spots we are always going.

But I have been musing on the end of this era. We got our first red and gray Suburban in 1988 just weeks before Dad and I got married to accommodate our now increased family, and so many memories cling to that car. At first we could cram everybody in, including the dog, for trips to Paul’s cabin in Cascade. It took us to Missouri where we donned old clothes and muddied them up in caves and played night games on Dad’s farm. It was our signature car—a car big enough to hold all the Proctors—for trips around town or on the road—and we took many. Eliot, Dad and I drove to Guatemala in our Suburban, taking down a fairly, decent new car, and bringing back a very road-weary one. We hit a series of potholes in Oaxaca that damaged the transmission. We only realized it when the back window was coated by a sticky goo that was the transmission fluid. No worries. The enterprising Mexicans helped us by propping the car up on a tree trunk and patching us through to the next good size town, which happened to have the part we needed—a small miracle in itself.

We had jammed the Suburban full of everything we would need for a 6 week journey into the wilds and jungles of Mexico and Guatemala, including the gear of seven people, spare parts for the car, security systems, and canned goods for those places where we wouldn’t be able to get something to eat. Under every seat we had stored canned goods and we laughed because every time we opened the door, a can would roll out—most often Spaghettios. We learned to say, “Oh, oh. Spaghettios.”

We moved children to college in the Suburban, packed in supplies for wedding receptions. We sang in the Suburban “Let Me Call you Sweetheart.” When the first Suburban went to a better world, we got the fire engine red one and started a whole new history with it as we first drove cross country, pulling a 12 foot trailer with mattresses and a fold-up table to start a life in Virginia. Now that era is gone and with it I feel some wistfulness. I have loved the Suburban memories for they are all memories of life to together as a family.

A Memorable Walk

Dad has recently written about our love of Burke Lake Park, a spot that is deeply sewn in our souls because we have taken so many memorable walks and jogs there. Sometimes we jog in relative silence because I get out of breath, but when we walk, we talk in such a soul-searching, revelatory sort of way about how to live with beauty and grace that it has forever changed me. Recently we discovered a wide, paved path that meanders far into the woods, one that surprisingly we had never really looked at before. Yesterday we explored it and had one of those times of life that I shall ever remember and will continue to feed me. It was a misty morning, a gray mysterious day, with low-lying patches of fog, so much so that the earthen dam at one end of Burke Lake Park looked as if it disappeared into nothingness. The distance around Burke Lake is 4.6 miles, but this new path, our road less traveled by, went farther to another lake, and we never made it to the end.
The forest around the path was scattered with trees spaced far enough apart that you could see well into the woods, revealing a landscape of lovely undulations, hills that rose and fell, covered with last year's rusty leaves. In the woods we saw a curious, brown rabbit, the tracks of a deer, that hesitated for a moment in the mud, a black squirrel that skittered up a spare, unsubstantial tree. Most enchanting in the mist was that the forest was dotted with puffs of white, the silken handiwork of artistic spiders where the moisture clung to each strand. This was a place forgotten, a place of silence like a dreamscape. I've never been anywhere quite like it--so far away from the demands and busyness of any day, it was as if time stopped. I don't have a picture of that view, but I will add one that looks something like it to this post.
This was a place I always thought existed, but hadn't seen it until today.

Caribbean Holiday--Feb. 9-17, 2008

Cruising has been one of the most delightful parts of our lives for many years, sponsored both by my mother as she took our family on trips down the rivers of Europe through Austria and Germany to New Amsterdam and on a cruise on the Baltic, but also because Scot and I have had the privilege to lecture on several trips with the Cruise Lady. In February we journeyed with Mom and Royce, Peggy and Paul and Mariah on a Book of Mormon cruise on the west Caribbean, leaving Saturday February 9 and returning on Sunday February 17th. We had the fun of lecturing on the Book of Mormon and basking in the wonderful company of our family. Our itinerary took us to Grand Cayman, Cozumel to see the ruins in Tulum, Belize City where we took ride on a boat 25 miles into the jungle and finally to Roatan where we soared through the jungle canopy on ziplines. Here is a brief photo journey of an unforgettable time in paradise.

Mom and Royce are such vibrant good sports, always game for anything. They always forget their chonology and seem ageless.
We have lots to smile about. At home in Virginia the weather is gray and cold, but we are basking in the rays.
In Grand Cayman we took a boat out to a sandbar where we could stand waist deep in the ocean, not seeing land in any direction. Our companions were stingrays that swarmed around us, brushed our legs like a whisper and let us pet them and pick them up. We couldn't stop laughing as their little sucking mouths grabbed at our skin.
We kissed the stingrays for good luck, and they kissed us too. Nothing like a stingray shower bath to clean you right off.Mariah is not as in control of this stingray as she looks.A native is hiding behind the stingray, here to help Mariah control it.Mariah, too, gets a shower from a loving stingray.
Mariah and I are always trying to figure out if we look alike, so we posed the same to let the camera help us figure it out. An old commercial on television used to ask, "Which twin has the Toni?" (a brand of permanent).
Cruise life is always fun and you have the illusion that you are a wealthy potentate whose every wish can be instantly granted. Dad sang a couple of nights on the karoake ship and had several people say he was great. Eating is elegant. One night we stayed up to look at a grand buffet which is like no spread I've ever seen before with ice sculptures and fancy, intricately decorated cakes. We didn't eat, just looked because the thought of putting any food into ourselves at 12:30 a.m. was beyond comprehension. Every night we came back to our room to find that one of our towel s had been folded into an animal shape. This was a pig wearing my sunglasses. One night our towel was a monkey hanging from the curtain rod.After visiting Grand Cayman, our second day ashore was at Tuluum an ancient Mesoamerican site that towers over the turquoise Caribbean.The ruins at Tuluum include a temple to Kukulcan, the winged serpent, and a symbol of the white God that permeates all of Mesoamerican culture. This picture is not that temple, but just a representation of the site.Mariah is just monkeying around here.Our trip to Belize was exotic with a 25 mile jungle ride by boat back to the ruins of Lamanai. (Notice the Laman in there. Lamanai means submerged crocidile and this is a site of a rugged, ancient site.We climbed the big pyramid at Lamanai and had a view from the top that shows how completely submerged in trees the ancient pyramids are. Mesoamerica remains one of the great mysteries of the earth.Descending the pyramid was not for the faint of heart and demanded that we hold onto a rope for stability. Dad just bounded down and didn't use the rope.This was a tempermental monkey in Roatan at the base where we got wired up for the zipline. Our guide told us that this monkey only liked men and hated women. I couldn't quite believe that, but it was true. The monkey adored Dad, but when Mariah and I tried to hold the monkey, he hissed and batted his arms aggressively.Here is Mariah about to take off on a zipline which will soar above the jungle canopy from tree to tree. Royce and his brother, Paul, both in their eighties did the zipline as well. Grandma wanted to do it, but was ultimately convinced that it might damage her back where she has had several cracked vertebrae which have had to be filled in the last couple of years.Whee!This is really a thrill. Hold on, Mama!Sometimes instead of ziplines we walked between the trees on rickety bridges high above the jungle floor. Mariah does it with flair.
Mariah has a future in the circus.

I love the jungle and the jungle flowers--especially the one in the foreground.