“You’ll have to use your knees and feet,” my hubby told me as he tried to pull me over the lip of the cliff.
Although we weren’t very high, maybe nine feet above the ground, I couldn’t convince my knees and feet to cooperate, so I dangled with my legs flared out behind me like superman in flight.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t wearing a red cape and tights.

I could hear the clank of shovels hitting buried rocks and the men panting from exertion, but they didn’t talk much as they dug dirt from the side of the road to fill the crevices of the washed-out road from Piute Pass into Red Canyon.
Ned Smith, Ted, and I had started from Blanding with our ATVs in tow.

Using a drawing pencil and pad, I traced the space around the table in my mom’s hospital room. The switch in my brain felt painful.
I’d never noticed the negative or white space before, but Betty Edwards, Ph.D. had developed a series of exercises in her book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, one of which required drawing the space surrounding an object rather than the object itself.

“When you love you should not say, God is in my heart, but rather, I am in the heart of God.” ~ Kahlil Gibran
As a high school freshman, I contracted a serious illness, ran a high temperature, and stayed in bed for two weeks.

The lesser goldfinches in our yard often perch upside down on the sunflowers, busily plucking seeds from the mature heads. Holding on with their tiny feet, they ride the flowers like miniature ships as they sway in the breeze.

Dustin, our guide, handed us each a long-burning candle inserted into the bottom of a bucket. We stood just inside the mouth of the cave where enough outside light illuminated an iron gate.
“Iron,” Dustin intoned, “repels spirits and keeps them from leaving the cave. Once we pass that gate, our only light will come from our candles.

Clumsy and plump, Steven Pfenniger cried easily, which didn’t earn him any respect from the pack of kids running our neighborhood in Hutchinson, KS.
His dad owned a shop just off Fourth Street and repaired TVs, but we didn’t know much more about him or his family — which was unusual in our subdivision.

I first met Blanding on the Fourth of July many years ago when my family and I visited my brother Tom.
After some rough experiences including war, Tom, a police officer, decided he wanted to raise his young family in a small religious town so he looked on a Utah map, prayed, and chose two possibilities, St. George and Blanding.

As I was walking between the Quonset hut and the old chicken coop, I heard my cousin scream.
I peered around the door of the old coop where my cousin Linda cowered on the roost. Two Shetland ponies had chased her there and were not about to let her down. Linda and I were ten years old.
“Merry, go get Gran! Hurry! Betty won’t let me down.”

Joshua means, “God is deliverance,” an unlikely name for the largest yucca plants in the world, but according to Katie Noonan, when settlers sent out by Brigham Young first saw the trees southwest of St. George, they thought they resembled Joshua from the Bible.
Not all early explorers thought the trees pointed toward the promised land, however.

by Merry Palmer
I held my breath as we started down the 600-foot, orange sand dune into Moqui Canyon. With our fellow adventurer, Ned Smith, following in his Razor, Ted drove our Pioneer 500 to the end of the dugway’s first slope. He stopped, put on the parking brakes, and he and Ned climbed out to peer down the dubious road.

“I always wanted to see the pyramids,” Dad told me once over the phone. Maybe that’s why he always listened so intently when I described the Ancestral Puebloan ruins, pictographs, and petroglyphs found in San Juan County.
He died on December 19, 2021, just a month short of his 95th birthday. He never visited the pyramids. In fact, he never left the United States, but he loved seeing new places.

Last week as I looked out the window at the stars, the story of the first English poem, “Song of Creation,” came to mind.
According to Bede, an eighth-century historian, an illiterate man named Caedmon herded the cattle owned by a great monastery on Northumbria’s rolling hills in what is now northern England.
One night, he retreated to the barn because of the revelry taking place in the great hall.

Recently, one of my friends told me that when she and her husband drove up on Blue Mountain to view the fall colors, they wended their way along an aspen-lined road.
“The leaves seemed illuminated from within,” she said. “The light didn’t come from the sun because it was a cloudy day.”

Years ago, with our wedding date approaching, Ted and I planned our honeymoon in the great Southwest. Because it sounded romantic, I said, “Let’s go someplace with white sand.”
I pictured an area with pure white sand glittering in the sunlight and a rich blue sky arching overhead. Oddly enough, I didn’t mean an exotic, faraway beach, and I’d never heard of White Sands National Monument.