Musings on Life and Living

July is a special month for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is the month we celebrate Pioneer Day: July 24, 1847. This was the day that the first party of Mormon refugees arrived in the Salt Lake Valley and Brigham Young, then President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, looked upon the desert and proclaimed, "This is the right place!" The Latter-day Saints had fled their city of Nauvoo, Illinois, in February 1846, about a year and a half after their prophet and leader, Joseph Smith, Jr., had been assassinated with his brother, Hyrum, in Carthage, Illinois. This was the latest of many migrations the Saints had made in their 16 years as an organised religion. They had moved from New York to Ohio to Missouri to Illinois and, after Joseph's death, sought to find a place where they could worship God "according to the dictates of their own conscience" in peace and freedom. (The Salt Lake Valley was, at the time, a part of Mexico...

We live in a college town. That means that many of our friends are college students; more particularly, many of them are graduate students. (The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign being a Research I institution .) What this means for us is that many of these dear friends come into our lives for a period of approximately five to seven years and then leave as they accept jobs elsewhere. Gretch and I have now been married for nine years, one month, and three days. (And yes, I am always counting.) Each summer we have said goodbye to friends as they have graduated and moved all over the nation (or occasionally even overseas). But this summer seems to have been particularly jarring, likely because many of our friends who have moved were people we helped move in and welcomed to our community, especially our faith community. They have been the best of friends; in fact, many of them are like family. As I have dealt with the emotional roller coaster that has accompanied these...