As "city kids" we were always getting our eyes opened and even our ears. The local dialect of our new neighbors could rival anything Eliza Doolittle could dish out with her Cockney English. The old, local farmers could weave a story laced with improper verb tenses and colored with profanity that somehow didn't seem profane at all. Instead of being offensive, we found the dialogue charming and full of "salt of the earth" wisdom and entertaining as hell. Did I just say that? I think their influence has rubbed off on me. Well, some of it. After living here for 30 years, I still say Mink Creek instead of Mink Crick.  I actually learned to say "crick" when I was a child in Boise, but when we moved to Salt Lake, the other children made so much fun of my speech that I had to quickly learn how to speak "properly," and there was no way I was returning to the local vernacular. We loved seeing Burnell Baird's truck pull down the driveway, or hearing Vilar Ransom's horn honk out in the driveway at 6:00 in the morning. To stop working and share stories with the neighbors is one of the supreme pleasures of a Mink Creek kind of day.