Triggered Memories

February has arrived.  Not much different than January has been.  But it brings with it a few memories.  It was almost two years ago, that our daughter, Heidi, had received her mission call.  Since she was living in Missouri at the time, she thought it would be nice to be endowed in the Nauvoo temple.  So Becky and I made plane reservations and flew to Kansas City where we borrowed a car, picked up Heidi and drove to Nauvoo.  She was endowed on the 11^th of February.  We spent the night before in the Nauvoo Hotel.  Then on that Saturday morning, we walked the two blocks to the temple.  Walking those two blocks was one of the more miserable memories I can recall.  The wind was blowing; I don’t recall if snow or freezing rain was falling, but it was cold.  The wind was right in our faces and I wondered if I was going to survive the hike.  But we made it and the temple seemed so warm inside.  What a comfort after the short trek.

One of the temple missionaries there at the time was one that I had known from the Mt. Timpanogos temple.  We got to see him that day.  A year later, after he had returned home off his mission, I asked him about the weather that day.  He said that that winter had been a very mild one; that they had only had three or so major blizzards that year, and evidently, we had walked into one of those.  Little did we realize then, that we would be back here ourselves, also serving as temple missionaries, and experiencing similar weather conditions on a regular basis.   Today, we enjoy these cold spells, and these blizzards, being better prepared for them.  We have the footwear and the coats and the thermals.  For us now, it is easier to tolerate – and besides, we now know what to expect.  Then we had been caught completely off-guard.

At home, in Utah, when we forget to flush our lawn sprinkler pipes before winter, and allow the water in them to freeze, the pipes break, causing grief in the spring when we turn the water back on.  We may end up needing to replace one or more pipes as breaks are detected.  They have similar problems here too.  Last Monday, a pipe in the temple that provided water to the emergency sprinklers froze, causing a sprinkler head to open up and rain filthy water throughout an upper-room in the temple.  This caused a lot of water damage both to that sealing room and to the marriage waiting room below it.  Now almost a week later, almost all the damage has been repaired.  In the meantime, a couple of weddings were performed, and I doubt any of our guest ever knew there was a problem.  That is because we have more than one sealing room and we would take the guests directly to the sealing room rather than by way of the marriage waiting room.  Interestingly, Becky and I were the guides for two of those weddings.  If there were others, I am not aware.