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My memoirs

Chapter 1: The Sanctuary at Otto, Wyoming

My mother moved us frequently during my childhood. After she divorced my stepfather, we found ourselves living in Pleasant Grove, Utah, where my grandmother Florence was also living at the time. Seeking a fresh start and a place of safety, Grandma told us that we could move up to the old family ranch house in Otto, Wyoming.

To me, as a teenager, the ranch house looked absolutely grand. It was bigger than anything we had ever lived in before. It had a big, beautiful front porch made for sitting outside, and inside there were three or four rooms, a living room, and a massive kitchen and dining area.

That kitchen was the heart of the house, and sitting proudly inside it was my grandmother's top-of-the-line wood-burning stove—the one my grandfather Leslie Miller had bought for her years ago with his gold strike bonus from the Mercur Mine. That stove had a temperature gauge on it and was her absolute pride and joy.

Living there that summer between my junior and senior years of high school was a step back in time. My grandfather had designed the house so that the kitchen and the bathroom shared an adjacent wall. This meant that the water pumped from the well could reach the kitchen sink, the toilet, and the hand basin in the bathroom. However, there was no functional bathtub in the bathroom.

Because of that, taking a bath became a daily ritual centered around Grandma's prized stove. We would heat up big pots of water on the wood-burning stove, drag out a large, oval aluminum tin tub, and set it right on the floor of the kitchen-dining area. We poured the hot water in, and that is how we bathed. It was hard work, but it connected us directly to the grit and heritage of the family who built it.

Because we relied on that heavy wood-burning stove for everything from cooking meals to heating our bathwater, keeping it fed was a daily chore. As the oldest and biggest child, the job of chopping wood fell squarely on my shoulders. I would go out into the yard, log after log, swinging the heavy axe to keep our kitchen supplied.

The Wyoming basin is prairie country, known for its vast open skies and sudden, violent summer thunderstorms that roll in without warning. One afternoon, I was outside working at the chopping block as a storm started to brew. I was completely focused on my task, entirely unaware of the danger building in the sky above me.

Suddenly, my mother rushed to the door and screamed at me to get into the house immediately. She sounded like I was in deep trouble, so I dropped what I was doing and ran inside.

When I climbed the stairs and rushed inside, she was white as a ghost. She told me that as I had the heavy metal axe raised high over my head, preparing to strike the wood, a bolt of lightning targeted the blade. She watched in horror as a brilliant, transparent bubble of electrical light instantly formed entirely around me.

Remarkably, I hadn't felt a thing. I didn't hear a crack, and I didn't feel a shock—I had no idea that I had just been encapsulated by a bubble of lightning. To me, it was just another afternoon of chores, but to my mother, it was a terrifying miracle that her oldest child survived the storm.

Beyond chopping wood, my other massive responsibility that summer was tending to our food supply. We planted a huge garden—it must have been at least a quarter of an acre. Despite the size of the plot, nobody else would help me weed it. The entire burden fell on me.

That garden became the center of my life. I would go out into the hot sun and start pulling weeds from the very front row. It was a never-ending cycle; the plot was so vast that by the time I finally finished weeding all the way to the very back, the weeds at the beginning had already sprouted again. I would have to turn right around, walk back to the front, and start the whole process over. That endless loop of labor is how I spent a massive portion of my free time that summer.  Several weeks after I left the ranch, the horses got into the garden and ate everything but the nightshade plants.

It was hot, exhausting work, which made our afternoons at the local reservoir or pond a true saving grace. When the Wyoming heat became too intense, we would head down to the water. On those warm, beautiful days, we would skip the heavy chore of heating water on the kitchen stove altogether and just bathe right there in the cool reservoir. It was a wonderful escape from the dusty ranch house and a perfect way to wash away the dirt of the garden.

That summer, Mom also decided we should jump into homestead life by raising our own poultry. We went out and got a bunch of chickens, along with about a couple dozen turkey chicks. As it turned out, those turkeys were unbelievably dumb. Even though we kept them hydrated using those little poultry waterers where the water was only about half an inch deep, the chicks somehow managed to drown themselves in it. By the time the summer wrapped up, only five of those turkeys had survived. Those lucky five became a permanent fixture of the house, trotting up to the front porch and roosting right along the wooden rail.

To earn some extra money that summer, Mom and I both took jobs at a local café in Basin. I would drive out there with her each day. She ran the kitchen as the cook, and I worked out front waiting tables. The café was a real local hotspot, especially for the local police department. The officers always came in during their time off to chat, unwind, and have their coffee and donuts.

As a teenager, I was very big-chested and incredibly self-conscious about it, so I always tried to slouch or cover up to hide my figure. One day, I was serving a table of these regular police officers while they were chatting with us. One of them looked up at me and asked directly, "Why do you do that? Why do you always hide those? If I had those, I’d stick them out and be proud of them!"

I felt completely flustered by his blunt, small-town advice. I just stayed quiet, kept my composure, and finished serving them without letting it faze me. I am pretty sure I went back to the kitchen and told my mom what he said, and she just laughed it right off.

That unforgettable summer in Otto wasn't all hard work and café chores, though; it was also the place where I had my very first boyfriend, a local boy named Brett Jones. We spent our warm Wyoming evenings going to the drive-in movies in the area. Our families actually became permanently intertwined later on, when one of my relatives ended up marrying Brett's father—a connection I still need to map out for our records!

As August began to wind down, Brett asked me to stay behind in Wyoming with him. It was a tempting, romantic idea for a teenager, but I had worked too hard to let my goals slip away. I loved the life and the setup I had built back in Utah. I was deeply involved in my high school, serving proudly as the parliamentarian for both the Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA) and the French Club.

I knew my future was waiting for me back home. So, when the autumn air began to cool the prairie, I said my goodbyes to the big ranch house, the five turkeys on the porch rail, the quarter-acre garden, and my first love. I moved back to Pleasant Grove to live with my grandmother Florence, ready to tart on my senior year of high school and step into the next chapter of my life.

Little did I know that I would follow in my forefathers' footsteps and make Wyoming my home. See less

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