Today, my mind drifted back to the first place Ronda and I lived when we were first married. I say “place” because it wasn’t an apartment or house. It was a very small trailer. The trailer would have seemed larger if we could have lived in the whole thing but the electric heater would only keep the front of it warm in the bitter cold Iowa winter. We shut up the back part and slept on a fold down couch in the front room slash kitchen. We could almost put our arms out and touch both walls. The total livable space was smaller than our kitchen in our Hyrum house. The water heater was so little that it would only fill the tub up with two or three inches of water. Sitting down in the water wasn’t enough to give a reasonable bath for getting clean and there wasn’t enough for a quarter of a shower. I remember Ronda and I getting up early every morning (about five or five thirty) and going to the gym to play racquetball so we could have a shower and be presentable before she went to Mary Greeley Hospital for her internship in recreational therapy and I to the Child Development Department to work as an instructor. Getting ready for Sundays was even a bigger challenge. This meant playing racquetball Saturday nights so we could get clean for Sunday church meetings. Ronda and I got very competitive and fairly good after so much practice. One morning, two doctors (Ronda worked with at the hospital) saw us going into a court and smugly challenged us to a game. After beating them rather badly they grumbled off never to challenge us again.

One of the best memories of Ames, Iowa was the evening Ronda and I went for a walk on campus by the small lake with the white swans. This was where Ronda told me that we were pregnant with our first child, Tanielle. Just thinking about it brings tears of joy to my eyes. Iowa State University conjures fond and happy memories for me. That was twenty-eight years ago.
The picture below is Tanielle and baby Joshua also many years ago.