I'm tucked inside my warm little den, watching lazy snow flakes floating down outside my window. It's a good day for reflection, and good time of life for contemplation. I'm in the autumn of my life, (I won't admit to winter that starts around eighty years old), and its the time of life for evaluating what you've done and what you still want to do. You ask questions about what was really worth it, what would you have done differently, and you start giving advice.  So here's mine. Work together. When Wynn and I were working together, not just physically but mentally and spiritually working together on the same page  we were awesome! When the children were added into the mix, we became an incredible team. So be amazing, and I'll get back to my history.
   It was while Wynn was finishing the house in Blanding that I rented the Hyrum place, and you know how that turned out. We ended up in the basement of Grandma Costleys. During all of this, Wynn was working a car cleaning business of his own called Tidy Car and helping my dad remodel some apartments. Our research proved that the best place to get a teaching degree was from Weber State College, so we looked around for a place to live in the Ogden area. We found the perfect arrangement as managers for a low-income, government subsidized housing complex in Layton, right next to the freeway and right under the approach to Hill Air force Base.
  They were big three and four bedroom apartments made out of cinder block. You couldn't put any furniture against the wall because the walls were always weeping and the black mould was prolific. Our largest ethnic group was Laotian and the smell of their cooking wafting about on a summer evening breeze was nauseating. I don't want to know what they were cooking, and I'm really glad I didn't have to eat it.
  There were children everywhere. I counted 32 kids in my apartment one day. We added Landon to our own family circle while we lived in Layton and Hannah started school at Lincoln Elementary. While I was surrounded with children and tenants with problems all day, Wynn was off to school. He had been accepted into the education department at WSC and was taking a full load. In the final weeks of his schooling we got a phone call from Blair Lowe, one of his advisors; he offered Wynn a position in the Teacher Corps program which would give him a living stipend, a full scholarship and a Masters degree. Weber State was only a college at the time, so the Masters degree had to be jointly sponsored by Utah State University.  It was a deal we couldn't refuse even though it would keep us in Layton an additional two years. Sigh. Some days, dreaming about  the solitude of Mink Creek was the only thing that kept me moving forward, and I learned that finding peace in the middle of chaos could make a Mink Creek kind of day even in Layton, Utah.