Monday Memories - The Banana Field

Abe and Grace have been vacationing in Hawaii.  It's been fun to get a daily-picture text from them.  

When I got this photo from them it reminded me of an experience I had 30+ years ago while I was a student at BYU-Hawaii.  My best friend Anita and I lived on the backside of Hale 6 - one of the dorms.  There were coconut trees out our window, geckos on our windows, and a field of banana trees twenty yards away.  Having grown up far from town, living among people all-day-every-day was a new and overwhelming experience.  That banana field was a very welcome solitary reprieve and I would often go there to be alone.    

One Sunday morning, feeling bewildered and overwhelmed, I took my patriarchal blessing (a personal blessing like the ones Jacob gave to his sons in Genesis) out to the field with me.  There is a sentence in my blessing that had always made me think that I would marry late in life.  However, that morning sitting under a banana tree, it was impressed upon me that the sentence could mean exactly the opposite:  I could marry very young.  

I sat there on the damp ground wondering about that new idea.  I strongly felt that I should change my schedule of upcoming classes and, instead of forging fast and furious in my major, should also include classes that would help me to be a good wife and mother.  I altered my thinking and in the next few semesters included children's literature, teaching special needs and gifted children, home nursing, child development, achieving successful marriage, and other similar classes in my schedule.

One year, to the month, after that experience, I went on my first date with Calvin.  We were married several months later; I was 19 years old and became not only a wife, but a stepmother.  Good thing I had that experience in the banana field.  I needed more than archaeology, animal science, and scuba diving for my next phase in life.

(**wait a minute.  After I posted and went to bed I realized I needed that animal science class.  That was how I met Calvin.)