Category: Entries

The Primary Temple Trip

by Laura Hilton Craner

When they asked for a volunteer to drive the McCumber children on the Primary temple trip, Sister Miller didn’t notice hers was the only hand to go up. She hadn’t had a Primary calling or a Primary-aged child for years, but something had moved her, so she volunteered.

The Primary president sounded breathlessly surprised when she confirmed that yes, Sister Miller had actually volunteered and that this wasn’t a joke. “They don’t come to Church very often but they were there on Sunday,” she said, “and all five said they wanted to come. The youngest, Devon, is still in a booster seat but the rest, well. They won’t…um, they won’t be any trouble.” Her voice went strangely high on the word “any” and seemed to choke a little on the word “trouble.”

That Saturday morning Sister Miller woke up at 6:35 am, read her scriptures, showered and got dressed, and made sure to put on her best broach. Every trip to the temple was special.

She got in the car at 8:45 am and prayed that she would be able to drive safely and that the hearts of the McCumber children would be touched. With a whispered, “Amen,” she was off.

The McCumber children came spilling out the doorway before Sister Miller even put the car in park. She had thought there were only five of them but the way they were running around the yard made it hard to count.

The oldest—or at least the largest—a boy, sat in the front seat. “I’m only eleven,” he blurted out, “But I’m as big as a twelve year old so I can sit up here. My mom always says it’s okay.” Sister Miller thought she could smell Pepsi on his breath.

He scootched closer as a girl, almost his height but not quite, slid in next to him. “Ugh,” she said. “Matthew, you always think you get the front seat but you’re just barely eleven. I’ll be twelve next week.”

Sister Miller was going to ask about the booster seat when she glanced in her rearview mirror and saw four kids—no, three kids and a large neon yellow stuffed rabbit—squished in the back. The booster seat was in the middle and was occupied by the rabbit.

Matthew and the girl seated next to him saw it at the same time. They both turned around and started yelling. Their words were unintelligible to Sister Miller but they must have made sense because the younger ones (Sister Miller guessed they were eight, six, and maybe three years old—all boys) immediately scrambled and in minutes the smallest was in the booster seat with the stuffed rabbit belted onto his lap.

With a prayer in her heart, Sister Miller set off. Matthew and the girl fiddled with the radio, stopping on the loudest stations and arguing about every song. The younger ones whispered back and forth, occasionally poking each other. They had just reached the first stop light when a boy on one side of the booster seat asked a question, “Old lady? What’s a temple?”

Sister Miller decided to ignore the “old lady” and smiled beneficently. She knew this was one of those teaching moments that could plant a seed in a child’s heart. But before she could utter a word the boy on the other side answered, “God’s house. Duh. Where else do you think he’s gonna live? The Motel 6?”

All the kids laughed so loudly they couldn’t hear Sister Miller trying to answer. She began to think that maybe it was a good thing the ride only took about ten minutes. She could answer him when they got to the temple.

She turned left and was about to point out the spire on the temple rising just a few blocks away when another question came from behind, “Old lady? You ever been on a snipe hunt?” Without even pausing for an answer the child began to talk so fast Sister Miller could hardly catch a word, “Snipes-is-these-giant-black-birds-and-they-eat-kids-especially-the-ones-who-like-to-sleep-outside-so-you-should-never-sleep-outside-because-they-could-kill-you-faster-than-a-bear-or-a-mountain-lion-or-a-ninja-or-a-zombie-and-they’re-big-and-ugly-and-my-cousins-told-me-they-saw-one-once-when-they-were-in-Idaho-and-that-people-in-Idaho-give-their-babies-to-the-snipes-once-a-year-and-if-you-don’t-they-leave-you-in-the-forest-to-die-so-that’s-why-you-gotta-hunt-’em-but-only-at-night.”

This was punctuated by a screech of sacrilegious proportions uttered by the littlest one in the booster seat and probably instigated by the brother who hadn’t been talking but was now suspiciously gazing all-too-virtuously out the window. Sister Miller wasn’t sure how to calm the youngest since the neon yellow bunny almost completely hid him.

Just as his wailing, and Sister Miller’s racing mind, reached a fever pitch an acrid stench filled the car. All the children started gagging and pointing fingers.

“Michael! What did you eat for breakfast?” came from the front seat.

“It wasn’t me! The smeller’s the feller, Emmeline!” was the retort.

“I’m gonna barf,” came another voice from the back seat. “That smells like cow—!”

Sister Miller’s jaw dropped and through her burning ears she focused on the sound of her own voice singing, “Let us oft speak kind words to each other. . . .” Just as they pulled through the temple gates a chorus of voices called out, “I’m telling, Mom!!” and “Jeez, Andrew!” and “You said a potty word! You said a potty word!” and “Why you gonna tell Mom? She says that all the time!”

Sister Miller wasn’t sure who said what because she was quite distracted by the sound of the youngest who, no longer crying, was jubilantly singing his own song— a simple song made up of only one word. One incredibly inappropriate, Holy-Ghost-offending word.

She parked the car and all the kids tumbled out just as fast as they had climbed in, paying no heed to the temple landscaping—except for the preschooler who reached sticky hands out from behind the bunny.

As Sister Miller lifted him and the bunny out of the car, he leaned in close and whispered in her ear, “Thanks, Old Lady.” Then, pointing at the temple and nuzzling his rabbit into her neck he added, “Jesus loves you.”

20/20

by Lindsay Denton

I first realized there might be something wrong with my vision in sixth grade. My teacher, Mrs. Bullock, had switched up the seating chart, and I ended up on the back row next to a black-haired boy named Alan. Boys still had cooties in those days, but I had to breach the taboo when I noticed something odd. Mrs. Bullock was standing at the chalkboard, her wrist moving smoothly, producing her signature curlicue script, except…

“Is the chalk broken?” I hissed. Alan looked at me blankly. “The chalk!” I said. “There’s nothing coming out of it!” Alan continued to stare. Looking back, I’m not sure if he was afraid of my cooties or if he just thought I was stupid.

Finally, he said, “Uh, the chalk is fine.” He turned towards the front with an eye-roll. I followed suit, staring intently at the blank green board and wondering if I was the victim of an elaborate prank the rest of the class was somehow in on.

I waited for the teacher to sit at her desk before timidly making my way to the front of the room. Several rows up, thin white lines appeared on the board. A few steps further and the lines twisted themselves into legible script. I was unnerved. Moments later, an understanding Mrs. Bullock switched me to the front row.

I didn’t think much of the incident until a couple weeks later when it was time for school-wide vision screening. I was nervous as I stood in line waiting for my turn to read off the pyramid of letters. I took the proffered cardboard circle, held it over my right eye, toed the line and said, “E.”

“Good,” the man said. “How far down can you go?”

I hesitated, my eye trying to make sense of the fuzzy tangle of black shapes. “Well, the next line looks like P and… S?”

He frowned.

Next thing I knew, I was at the end of another line–the line for the kids who failed the screening. I felt ashamed and embarrassed as I watched the rest of my peers troop back to the classroom.

A few weeks later, my mom set up an eye appointment for me. I still remember trying on my glasses for the first time. I stood in the optometrist’s office and glanced out the window at an adjacent empty lot.

“There are clods of dirt and tiny little rocks all over the ground!” I exclaimed. “And individual leaves on the trees!” It was surreal–I’d had no idea what I was missing. There was a whole new layer of definition to the world that I’d been completely ignorant of.

#

There are times when I take off my glasses at night as my husband drives. Every light we pass is a swollen, twelve-pointed sphere with the symmetry of a snowflake. I’m surrounded by colorful globes springing from taillights, stoplights, and streetlights. I feel blind, but warmed.

I love sharp, crisp lines of black and white – to see things as they are. But sometimes, surrounded by starkness, I miss the seamlessness of blurred outlines and swirling shades of grey.

One of my favorite things each holiday season is to take out my contacts and sit in the dark in front of our lit Christmas tree. Each tiny colored bulb swells into a large, brilliant orb, the ethereal spheres hung like ornaments in the air. There is something transcendently beautiful about the softness of it.

God is in the details, they say, and I’ve seen the truth of that with both physical and spiritual eyes. But God is also in a blanket of muffling snow, in a muted grey sky, in the creamy bokeh behind a sharply focused image.

Becoming an adult, losing childhood naiveté, has been refreshing in some ways, like putting on a pair of glasses I didn’t know I needed. Still, though, I sometimes miss going through life in a rosy haze, seeing the world without its sharp angles or harsh contrasts, each pinprick of light something delicate, gauzy, beautiful.

Day Thirteen: Marianne Hales Harding

Red Rock

You can’t take a picture of this.
No matter the angle, the pictures are just rocks, sky, water.
Nothing stirs in me when I look at them.
I am still caught in the swell of forgettable catastrophes, tight and hurried.
I delete every one of them. And then I take a few more. Continue reading Day Thirteen: Marianne Hales Harding

Day Eleven: Jonathon Penny

Babel

At the moment the languages were confounded, I was bent over a parchment, trying to ignore the sounds of construction that by then filled the city. I had no interest in the project myself. Indeed, I was apprehensive about its appalling hubris and the mind-boggling safety issues it presented. This was philosophical and personal. My brother oversaw construction of the balustrades that wound their way up the tower—a feat of engineering science I could never grasp, but that gripped him like a childhood fever: numbers were his, letters mine. Daring was also his: he always took on the most perilous duties himself.

I kept my misgivings to myself, however, even from him. The prophets who had spoken warnings of judgment and destruction were dead or in the quarries, Continue reading Day Eleven: Jonathon Penny

Day Ten: Kerry Spencer

The Gloaming

I’ve been spending a lot of time in hospitals lately. And the thing about hospitals is that they make you think a lot about cycles of life and death. For one thing, you can’t avoid it. Death, that is. In normal life you can meet the thought of your own mortality with a healthy dose of denial. And even when you go into the hospital, you can cling to that denial. Death is what’s happening to the other people. You, on the other hand, well, you’re just there to have something taken care of.

You can hold on to that delusion until night.

Because at night, in the hospital, everything changes.

Continue reading Day Ten: Kerry Spencer

Day Eight: Emily Debenham

The Shoe App

Catherine liked setting up her laptop in the café because the internet was free and she had hacked the video camera feed outside. From that she had created an app that would ping anytime a man over six feet entered the store.

Graced with her father’s lanky genes, she had hit 5’10 in the tenth grade and stayed there. Worse, she had an addiction to three inch heels, courtesy of her mother, a heritage she clung to since she passed. So she needed the man in her life to tow the 6 feet tall line.

Otherwise the thousands of dollars she had invested in shoes would go to waste on their custom built racks in her generous walk-in closet. Her mother had always said “A good pair of shoes will chase away the blues.” Something Catherine had desperately needed after she was gone. Her obsession was more than mere vanity.

She would burn her shoes before she allowed others to label her as vain.

Catherine was chic, savvy, fashionable, and determined. Not vain. Continue reading Day Eight: Emily Debenham

Day Seven: Kathryn Soper

Oil of Gladness

The Elders’ Quorum president held up the quart-sized bottle for everyone to see. “For anointings we use olive oil—preferably extra virgin,” he explained. The women murmured in approval. They knew that extra virgin, product of the first pressing of the olives, is the best.

The liquid in the bottle shone a rich yellow. Pretty, but not as impressive as the olive oil my grandmother poured freely in the days of my childhood. Imported from Greece, the thick green oil came in square, gallon-sized cans marked in geometric Greek. The filigreed designs in red and gold reminded me of the stained-glass windows in the Greek Orthodox church, where I fidgeted every Easter, nose wrinkling from incense, under the eye of the emaciated Christ hanging above the nave. Continue reading Day Seven: Kathryn Soper