aPARENTly

Despite being the only redhead in my family, I've never had any doubts about my parentage. I don't even have to exercise much faith in the matter. Once, when my family came to my work to carol, one of my co-workers came up to me and said, "your dad cannot deny you;" point being that he couldn't claim I wasn't related to him because I LOOK like him.

Same thing happens when friends of my mother see me. I visited my mother at her work last week, and the secretary of the Psychology department looked at the both of us and commented how similar we look.

Admittedly hard to tell in this picture because the sunglasses are distracting

Reason for this post: I flew up to Utah to visit my parents, living out of a carry-on for a week. It's a "make-it-do-or-do-without" attitude that I got from my mother. Fortunately, when the weather proved too cold for my wardrobe, I could borrow hers.

My dad and my mom each drove me around in the UTV. My dad showed me the scenery, my mother showed me close-by outdoor activities. It's a good reflection of their personalities.

It's a pretty neighborhood. Sometimes it smells like sulfur, but the tantalizing closeness of wilderness makes it worth it.






Most of the time I was up in the canyon, it was too cold (by Texas standards) to do water-themed activities, so instead we hiked.







We hiked to Stewart Falls, initially so bundled up that hikers coming the other way in their sleeveless tops and capri pants surely suspected us to be from out-of-state, if not out-of-our-minds. When we reached the falls, though, we wanted a refreshing splash. We talked about how the yellow leaves reminded us of turkeys and pumpkin pie, and since we then came across wild turkey, discussed our hopes on finding a wild pumpkin pie. Still hasn't happened.
After that hike, we rode the ski lift at Sundance in its entirety, and noted how many people had dropped their water bottles, mardi gras beads, and flip-flops right underneath, and contemplated how many people died before workers had to stick a cover over the ladder on each pole nearest the ski lift chair.

I watched my mom teach her class (ironically the week of BYU's parent weekend), and took the stairs with her up to her office--actually, we only made it to 7 of 10, because of a certain burn in the lungs and legs, but to make it more entertaining, I sang "And we go up,up,up just to get a little higher! Instead of going down, down, down, which would be a lot faster!" as my adaptation of the song Clouds. The stairwells echo. It's cool.

On our hike in Cascade Springs, I likewise found a theme song.


 "I got my ticket for the long way round/the one with the prettiest of views./it's got mountains, it's got rivers, it's got sights to give you shivers/but it sure would be prettier with you"

There was also snow, so of course my parents got into a snowball fight. Which actually meant my mom throwing snowballs at my dad, and my dad throwing snowballs at ME. Maybe because I found a third theme song, "You only miss the sun when it starts to snow" from Passenger's Let her go.

We are a random bunch of people.

After one of our day trips, my mother needed to make a grocery run, so she assigned my dad and me to pick up a few items, and then she got the rest. She ended up waiting for us for 10 minutes to finish, because after I couldn't find the sugar snap peas, I got distracted in the greeting card aisle, and my dad got distracted by a phone call. On try 2 of locating sugar snap peas, I stopped at a food-sampling station, and was talking to the vendor about the similarity between his product and the Stinger Waffles athletes used, when my mother came up behind me and grabbed the peas out of my hand and walked on. The vendor looked dumb-founded, so I assured him that that lady was related to me. Which maybe isn't reassuring to him.

I went to church with my parents on my last day, and my mother's visiting teacher commented that I was a good mix of both my parents. I think the similarities are more than skin deep.