Today I received in an email a photo from 1965 when I was a teacher of dance at BYU. It came from the International Folk Dancers alumni committee chair who is collecting old photos to preserve. I had never seen this photo before and somehow it amazed me as I looked upon myself as a very young 24 years newly married wife standing next to my handsome recently returned missionary who served for 2.5 years for our Church in Brazil. I was teaching dance at BYU while he was working on his masters in Drama. No children had been born to our family. Little did I know what life held in the future.
Now 56 years later, I can look with compassion on my innocence and lack of experience which life would take care of with three sons, travels to Wisconsin, Brazil and then California-teaching dance and trying to hold my marriage together as my spouse warped in a real hippie 1970s style. I survived, got divorced returned to Utah, married a man from Sweden, had another son, and became an elementary school teacher then a librarian. But life CHANGES were not over after another divorce, I would married again and move to Roosevelt Utah, retiring from teaching and being a librarian to fill my life with writing and publishing family histories. An amazing trip that I could not have even imagined when I was 24 years old and now I am 81 and a grandma and great grandma wondering what the next stage of life will bring.