I love spending President's Day in Utah's Dixie! I left piles of snow and found partly green lawns and plenty of sunshine. I took my daughter and cousin to a fabulous park for some outdoor therapy that has been greatly missed up north. The bright sun was inviting a plethora of people to come play. I was pleased to observe the girls patiently waiting their turn. Additionally, they each helped other kids get on the equipment and gave them a push. This makes a mom proud.
This twirly-gig is super fun and at this point I must point out that when I was a kid, we did not have these nifty cool play toys.
We did, however, have merry-go-rounds that could go at incredible speeds, provided the pusher was strong and fast. The trick was to pile on as many kids as possible and to avoid burning your bare legs on the rusted, heat baked metal.
As the girls played, I walked the paved trail along the trickling river, nuturing my soul with the sights and sounds of spring like ducks swimming placidly then taking sudden flight.A small amount of water trickles slowly down it's bed reminding me that
the heat of summer will leave it dry. This is, after all, a desert. Though the sky is a vivid blue and the dirt is the red-orange of the hills, it's still rather barren without the trees dressed in leaves; their limbs are stark and bony. It reminded me of a story my Grandma Roundy used to tell me.
Shortly after the pioneers entered the Salt Lake Valley, a young man named David Cannon brought his wife, Wilhelmina, to southern Utah to help start a settlement. Wilhelmina, or “Willie” as she was called, was not at all happy. She hated the hot, dry desert, and cried constantly. She pleaded with her husband to take her back east, where plants and trees grew more easily and the weather was more moderate.
“Everything is so ugly here,” she complained. “If you can show me just one beautiful thing in this place, I will make myself content and stop complaining.” David went up into the mountains and returned with a beautiful three-petaled blossom with delicate colors. Willie honestly admitted to both David and herself that it was indeed a thing of beauty.
It was a sego lily, now the Utah State Flower. reference
When Grandma Roundy came out here to visit me in Virginia, for the first day or two she would marvel at all the green. Everything and everywhere is green here. One day as we were driving along she said "I finally understand. Always I would hear stories of kids getting kidnapped by a man who came out of the woods, and I would think 'Why do you keep letting your kids play in the woods?' and now I understand. It's because the woods are EVERYwhere!"
ReplyDeleteBut by the fourth or fifth day visiting, she'd start to miss the desert, and talk about feeling claustrophobic, closed in by all the trees all the time. She'd start to say she just wanted to see a patch of DIRT.