The Twilight Zone Part I

Help! I've fallen and I can't get up!

Seriously, peeps. I'm duct taped to my in-laws in the middle of bee-U-tiful Ideeho at a cabin in Island Park with no internet or cell phone reception. (btw, did you know that the Ideehoans spell their state Idaho? whodathought!)

I miss you peeps! I really really MISS YOU! There better be internet and cell phone service in Heaven, otherwise I might have to raise some major helk.

I am going to publish a post I wrote in the car while I was driving home from St. George. It's not complete, and I can't add the photos because it's hard to move your hands when you're duct taped to your in-laws, but it's better than no post of all.

Am I right or am I right?

This post was inspired by a stop in southern Utah to see my grandmother on the way home from St. George.

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I started writing when I was nine years old. I was trapped in the Twilight Zone at the time.

The Twilight Zone is a tiny isolated town in the middle of southern Utah called Mt. Carmel.

Directly across the street from Mt. Carmel perches a mountain called Sugar Knoll.

Sounds awfully sweet, doesn't it? You'd think so, but too much sugar can give you cavities, you know.

I have a lot of emotional cavities.

Every summer my dad would load us up into his purple VW van and drive us 4 hours south past all the sage brush and red rock to the Twilight Zone. My mom never came. The Twilight Zone had taken it's toll on her by then, just as it eventually would on all of us.

When I was nine I didn't understand how deep and wide the emotional cavities in my dad's family ran. And I certainly didn't understand the ties that bound their family to a little old house on Tait Lane where my grandmother was born out of wedlock in 1924.

But shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh . . . that's a secret. Everything that happened in the Twilight Zone is a secret.

And what isn't a secret is twisted and distorted beyond recognition.

But I didn't know that then. All I knew was that there was no running water. No T.V. No phone. No bathroom. And no sugar (despite all the sugary sweet knolls and mountains.)

There was no food either.

Well, there were promises of food too. Lots and lots of empty promises. Juicy pork chops and garlic mashed potatoes smothered in gravy. Corn on the cob dripping in butter. Cold sweet watermelon. Icee lemonade. But whenever we sat up to the table, either the adults had already eaten most of it or they had changed their mind to egg salad sandwich and a bowl of canned peaches.

My grandmother is extremely gifted. She's the only one I know who can spend 5 hours preparing egg salad and opening a can of peaches. I think it took her so long because she was always so busy receiving revelation for her family members.

Somehow she had a direct line to the powers that be. She knew what everyone should and shouldn't be doing. I think it was because she was so spiritually in tune.

One thing she knew for sure was that children should wash the dishes and then go outside and leave the adults alone to quote scriptures and cry about all of our dead loved ones.

They cried a lot about our dead loved ones. Especially when we children needed things, like a ride home from the Thunderbird motel pool in Orderville after all the local kids tried to drown us. Sometimes we walked the whole two miles home before they were done crying about our dead loved ones.

TO BE CONTINUED