Their Desert Home

So I'm in California now.

Kristina and I left SLC on Sunday morning--after we ate plates piled high with breakfast food double the size of our faces with Emily. And our car ride to Mesquite consisted of lots and lots of soft drinks, candy, car dancing, and Kristina downloading apps to my phone. Technology is amazing because almost in the instant that I vocalized that I wished there was an app for that silly M.A.S.H. game that we played in middle school, Kristina found one, downloaded it and had me married to Justin Bieber and living in a shack in Kona, Hawaii with our 23 kids. It's really too bad for the world that I am too old for JB and 23 kids.

We pulled into Mesquite in the mid afternoon to spend the remainder of the day and night with Christasha and their cute boys, Morgan and Wyatt who had moved to Southern Utah about one month ago. My one request when we arrived was to take a nap. And I did and it was glorious. I awoke just in time for some fish tacos and guacamole and some more soft drink drinking. We spent the hot, late afternoon eating and talking and lounging and Food Network-watching. And once the temperature cooled down a bit, Morgan requested that we go four-wheeling with him to look at the animals. That kid is really into animals right now. I happened to mention to Morgan that I had seen a moose the night before. And so Morgan wanted to hear ALL about moose and as he flipped through my phone pictures, he stopped on every nature picture and asked, "Is that where you saw the moose?" Unfortunately, he's not going to see moose anywhere near Mesquite, but I did share my "vast" knowledge of big horn sheep and desert goats and mountain goats with him--all of which really amounted to me doing Google image searches of those beasts and pointing out the various sizes of their horns. He clearly believed that Kristina and I were animal-knowledge gods because he later asked Kristina to tell him all about raccoons.

It's been six years since I lived in the desert and I had forgotten how beautiful the desert landscape can be after the heat of the day has abated, making it somewhat breathable. We took the four-wheelers out and toured the desolate area, checking out the horses and the donkeys. And then, we took off on a short trail that Morgan had nicknamed "The Forest." When we returned back to the desert home, we found Wyatt full of smiles and Tasha dishing up key lime pie.

It really was difficult to leave the next morning, especially as we all sat in our jammies, watching PBS shows, and thinking about how little I wanted to drive across that hot desert.

But we did.

And luckily, Christasha and the boys do not live that far away.