Mendon Connections

I love long family road trips where we get to go somewhere totally unfamiliar. But I've learned out of necessity that short trips to somewhere fairly familiar are great too! :) It's amazing how fresh and different life can seem even when you're only an hour or two away from home. That was our situation this year, when we really had no time for a family trip unless it was sandwiched in between other commitments. We'd stayed near Logan a few years ago and had such a fun time, so I looked in that area again for rental houses. And I found one! It was a converted barn (funnily enough, our last house was a barn too!) in Mendon, and we loved it!

It had big beautiful windows. A ping-pong table and toys. And plenty of space to spread out and play games or lounge on the couch and read!

Gus was awed. "Is it our WENTAL house?" he kept asking.

I love the way he's holding Caw's wing in this picture. Like he's dancing with him.

We liked the built-in bunk beds.

Daisy begged to be the one who got to sleep with Clementine! They were so cute!

Junie brought way more than the authorized number of pigs (one stuffed animal, I told her!!)

Anyway, we had a very quiet and nice time. I cooked most of our meals just like I do at home, but it felt different and novel, in a new kitchen, with such a pretty yard to look out at and with all kinds of strange adaptations necessary to keep things interesting. (You know, like getting along without a certain measuring cup or having to roll a pie crust out with a can of pan spray because there's no rolling pin. It's just kind of fun.) Even shopping at the Logan Costco felt foreign enough to be surprising.

It was also kind of fun to devise meals that could use a very limited set of ingredients in an efficient way. We ate very well, considering! :) And then there turned out to be blackberries in the yard, and they made a delightful addition to several meals. I thought at first there were only a few, but once we went out to pick them in earnest, we filled a whole bowl, and then two, and then three, and ended up with enough to have blackberries on French toast, make blackberry milkshakes twice, and make a whole blackberry pie (in a deep-dish casserole dish appropriated for the purpose).

I had never so much as heard of Mendon before, but it's over by Wellsville, which I remember because my cousin got married in the mountains over there, and it was beautiful! We were very happily situated there, I thought. It felt rural and green and idyllic, as if you were a hundred miles from the city. But it was only a few minutes from Logan and a Rec Center Swimming Pool and the aforementioned Costco.

Our across-the-street neighbor had this fun swing set, which Ziggy immediately declared was "a guillotine." I am not entirely sure how he even KNOWS about guillotines, but he was very sure of himself. When we pushed back with, "I don't think it's actually a guillotine, Zig"—he insisted, "Yes! I saw the head-hole!" Head-hole or no, the two little boys have continued to have quite an interest in guillotines since then and I'm not wholly comfortable with it…but what can one do??

(A guillotine Gus built with blocks when we got home from our trip. Eeek!)

Malachi declared that this vacation was to be a "writing retreat" for him, and suited his action to his words. He still emerged to play ping-pong with me now and then (I remained undefeated at ping-pong from all challengers during the week…except for one dark day when Malachi won our tournament, 2 to 1. Sad.) and to go with us when we went out, but we didn't really do too many things. It was quite relaxing! Afterwards he told me he'd completed about the first one-fourth of his next novel. How industrious of him. I wish it could have been MY writing retreat too, but alas, someone had to make the meals and keep the children from throwing darts into the wall. 

Clementine adopted this bear we found at the house.

To my great surprise, the house next door to our rental had a sign out front with a familiar name…Fonnesbeck Greenhouse and Nursery. My grandma was a Fonnesbeck, and her father owned the Fonnesbeck Knitting Works which was on Logan Main Street for a hundred years! Nana's grandfather started the business after immigrating from Denmark, and several sons joined him in Logan over the years. So I'm sure this Fonnesbeck Greenhouse belongs to a cousin of mine! I talked to the owner for a minute when we walked by, but we didn't immediately find our genealogical link. :)

I do always feel a tug of family history when I'm in Logan. Even though I've never lived there myself, I've visited often enough, and read enough family stories that take place there, that it seems more than a place to visit. So it did feel somehow fitting to run into a Fonnesbeck right off the bat!

(While we're on the subject, here's an advertisement for Nana's father's store from a Logan newspaper in 1919. So cute! Nana and her sister Frances used to help him in the store.)

I did find a nice-looking Marigold at the Fonnesbeck Greenhouse! Took it home with me, too.

My very favorite thing about Mendon was how beautiful it is there! Just the greenest, prettiest, most peaceful countryside you can imagine. (Well…perhaps not if you are from Oregon or the East Coast. But the greenest, prettiest countryside a desert-dweller like ME can imagine!) The quiet and calm seeped into my very soul every time I stepped outside. I could totally imagine moving here with Sam when all the children are gone, to live out the rest of our days in bucolic serenity. Of course, the children will likely never all be gone, so that's silly, and I'm not sure either Sam or I know quite enough about cows or hay to be accepted among the townsfolk. But…we could learn?

Sam has an artist friend that paints barns. (Pictures of barns. Not the barns themselves…though he has in fact painted a mural on a barn, so I guess it's both.) I wouldn't go so far as to say he ONLY paints barns…but he's never happier than working on a barn, let's put it that way. The older and more decrepit, the better. Anyway, Sam and I always remark upon barns when we see them, and speculate about how much David Dibble would like this one or that one. When we saw this…silo thing (??) we both said in unison, "David Dibble would LOVE this!" We felt it in our bones.

I was surprised to find that there were so many ponds and waterways west of Logan. The road goes right through some beautiful marshland. There were lots of tall water plants in parts, and it looked like you could have gone winding through them in a canoe like a watery corn maze. 

Sam and I went on a little drive at sunset one day. Everything was especially beautiful in the golden light!

The house had a nice yard next to a little woodsy area. We found some frogs!

We didn't hear them chirping at night, sadly. But the crickets were nice.

Blackberry shakes. Or were they root beer floats?

A tiny person thinking she should be part of the blackberry shake-drinking

We made the pretty drive through Logan Canyon to Bear Lake one day. Ate at Zipz, of course, shedding a tear for Abe who would have liked to be there with us. He does love a place with many sauces!

Seb had stayed home for work at the beginning of the week, but he drove up in the other car to join us for a couple days—another benefit of being so close to home! We were happy to have him.

We were the least prepared ever for a day at the beach. We didn't have chairs, towels, shade, anything. It hadn't seemed worth bringing beach and sand stuff when we were trying to pack light. We did have swimming suits, however, so the kids at least got to change and play in the water for an hour or two while Ky and Seb waited with varying degrees of impatience on the shore.

The lake was so warm (for Bear Lake, anyway) and it was so pleasant just to wade around, even with nothing much else to do! We found some more frogs and a snake in the marshy area. Gus had a minor freak-out in an area of squishy mud, but other than that everyone was just happy to be in the water!

Clementine eyed this penguin floaty for quite some time before finally getting up the courage to tiptoe up and poke it in the beak.

Back at the house. Junie showing off a few freshly-picked blackberries.

I didn't get a picture of the big pie I made, but the girls used leftover scraps of dough to make a tiny pie. They cooked it in a little ketchup cup we found in the kitchen!

We ate at a restaurant near Logan Canyon we found last time we were here. The main attraction is this HUGE pancake! Junie and Goldie gleefully ate the whole thing. (Well…minus the piece that Seb had and the bites all the rest of us tried!) (Look at tiny Ky with his a few years ago! And little Daisy!)

Sleepy little girl.

So sweet!

And sleepy Gus with Caw.

The coolest thing happened during this trip! When we got to our rental house, I texted my friend Nancy who I knew was in the middle of a move up to Logan. When I told her we were in Mendon, she texted back that she was practically next door! It turned out that our rental, which I'd booked early in the year without knowing anything about where she'd be moving to (I don't think even SHE knew where she'd be moving to at that point, let alone when)—was five minutes away from the little house she had just moved to days before! It was such a happy surprise. We are always wishing we could live closer to each other and now, just for a day or two—we did!

We got to go walking together one morning on the beautiful, totally not pedestrian-friendly, roads near her house. We saw camels! And Nancy got EATEN ALIVE by mosquitos. I got a few bites, but she was in shorts and the mosquitos clearly preferred the easy target. She must have gotten fifty mosquito bites in two minutes. Maybe a hundred. Eeeek! It was scary how they descended like locusts when we got near the marshlands. Good thing she's such a good friend and didn't blame me for her misfortune!

Nancy took me over to the family property she and her husband are in the process (the long, infuriating process) of trying to build a house on. It's so beautiful! The prettiest spot in this whole pretty area. I loved seeing this place I'd heard so much about, and (fingers crossed) I can't wait to come back and visit when the house is done!

Sandhill cranes. They have the funniest cries!

I was so happy it worked out so Nancy and some of her kids (she has ten like we do) could come over to our rental house for dinner and games. It was so cool to finally get our families together like we've always wanted to!

The younger kids seemed to have fun together.

And even the teenagers were good sports about being flung together with strangers at the whim of their mothers! I think they had a good time playing some games. After all this time, I feel like I know Nancy's kids as well as my own nieces and nephews, and my only concern was trying not to seem too creepy with how much I knew about them. 

Making a delicious cake.

There was a beautiful sunset as we went outside to wave goodbye to Nancy's family!

There is not much more to tell. We went swimming at the Logan Pool one day. And the kids played a lot in the yard.

Junie found a big pillbug

Ziggy caught a grasshopper. (There were MILLIONS of them in the tall grasses. When you walked by in the heat of the afternoon, you could see the grasses coming alive with them jumping everywhere you looked. The girls did not like it, and I must admit, it was a bit much for me too. Grasshoppers are fine…but only in moderation.) 

Looking for frogs

Seb made a fire for us and we roasted marshmallows the night before we went home.

We had the last of the blackberries in a milkshake for breakfast the next morning, and then drove home!

Such a good family trip!