Segullah

Mormon women blogging about the peculiar and the treasured

“Is Not This the Fast that I Have Chosen?”

Like most of you, I’m guessing, I haven’t always understood or relished the law of the fast. On Fast Sundays as a young girl I hated that hollow, gnawing feeling in my stomach and I passed the time in Sunday school fantasizing about my favorite treats—custard tarts, vanilla slices, lamingtons—always resolving to buy two of [...]

How Great Thou Art

Last Sunday our ward had the rare privilege of hearing Alex Boye sing a solo in sacrament meeting. I must confess at the time I didn’t know who he was, but when he started to sing a gospel rendition of “How Great Thou Art” I, like many other ward members, sat up straight in my [...]

Coming Clean

Over the years I’ve watched my husband try a myriad of diets: the Beach diet, the Fat-Flush diet, low-carb/high-fat diets, low-fat/low-carb diets, a raw vegetarian diet that gave him bad breath for weeks (all that garlic, all those weird spices–ughh), even the infamous lemonade diet (lemon juice mixed with maple syrup and cayenne pepper, consumed [...]

Forget Not

Like many of you, I attended the Saturday night Relief Society broadcast at my stake center and came away feeling spiritually rejuvenated and replenished. I listened with interest to Sister Beck’s talk about the history, purpose, and vision of Relief Society (can’t wait to read the new book!), Sister Allred’s thoughts on charity (note to [...]

Time is Running Out

to get your submission to us for the spring/summer 2012 issue of Segullah. The theme for the issue is Justice and Mercy, and the deadline is this Thursday, September 1st. If you have an essay on this topic that is 1,000 to 3,500 words, we’d love to hear from you. You’ll find style guidelines here [...]

Sunrise, Sunset or Where Did the Summer Go?

This morning my children will don their new school clothes and, toting new backpacks stuffed with sharpened pencils and blank notebooks, they’ll head out the door for the first day of school. And, just like that, summer vacation will be over. Like me, you may be wondering where the summer went. I always start summer [...]

Justice, Mercy, and Other Mysteries (Also, It’s Time to Send Your Submission to Our Journal)

Last fall I talked briefly about how, in 1999, we discovered that my husband’s trusted business partner had been embezzling large sums of money and engaging in some other dishonest business practices that put my husband’s company in jeopardy and almost drove us to bankruptcy. This man had stood in the priesthood circle just months [...]

Dream On

Though it’s been decades since I graduated from college, every couple of months or so I have the same dream: It’s finals week, and I suddenly discover there’s a class I’m registered for (usually some kind of science class) that I forgot to attend all semester long. I have the textbook—a big one—but there’s no [...]

Abundance

When the economy crashed in 2008 I had no idea that my husband and I would still be struggling financially nearly three years later. My husband is an entrepreneur/real estate developer, so we’ve been especially hard hit by the recession. While my husband tolerates financial risk and uncertainty quite well—he’s an entrepreneur, after all—I crave [...]

My Unforgettable Singing Debut

With American Idol season in full swing, as well as speculating whether Pia should have been eliminated, when Jacob will be voted off, and whether the finale will come down to Scotty vs. James, I also can’t help but think of my own brief moment in the spotlight when I sang my first—and last—solo in [...]

Parenting and Happiness

Twenty-one years ago I wrote the following in my daughter’s baby journal: “It’s a lovely morning—sunny, yet hazy in the hills with wisps of fog. The baby and I have had a pleasant morning playing downstairs. She squealed and rocked on her hands and knees as I played her Raffi tape. Then I fed her [...]

Dog Days of Winter

It’s been a long, dreary winter. February is creeping by, one snowy day blurring into another, and, after a couple of years of change and flux and shifting relationships, I’ve been feeling careworn and burdened on top of the usual winter malaise that often hits about this time. I turned fifty last fall and my [...]

Confessions of a Nonathletic, Very Uncoordinated Sports Unenthusiast

My sister and I once took a ballet class together at BYU. A couple of weeks into the class, after we’d memorized all the positions and practiced our plies and tendues and arabesques, the teacher asked us to dance one at a time across the room so she could evaluate our progress. I watched as, [...]

Post-Christmas Reflections

The new clothes and gadgets have all been put away (at least they’ve been moved up to the children’s rooms), wrapping paper and boxes are crammed in the recycling bin, and the sugar cookies and coconut bread and chocolates and the leftovers from Christmas Day have been eaten. After a whirlwind month of decorating and [...]

Peruvian Thanksgiving

November 21st, 1984. I’d been on my mission for fourteen months. I was working in Puno, high up on the Altiplano at 12,500 feet on the shores of Lake Titicaca. Besides Elder Moore—a culture shocked, baby-faced elder straight from the States whose sunburned nose was blistering in the altitude and whose stomach was in constant [...]

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