Mermaids JUJU

I was four years old when my family moved from Sandy, Utah to Alpine, Utah. My parents put our home in Sandy up for sale and surprisingly it sold very quickly. We were building our home in Alpine but it wasn’t ready for occupancy. So being the brave woman that my mom was, we packed all four of us kids and moved into an 18 foot camp trailer and parked it on the lot where our back yard would be after the house was finished.

My dad was a school teacher, and a very hardworking man, he worked with a few of his friends building a few homes every Summer when school was out. This Summer, it would be our home that he built.

I don’t remember a lot about the details of living in that trailer, but I know it had a pump faucet sink in the kitchen, (ha! kitchen!) cold water only, a porta-potty in this little closet like space, no shower, hot water came from boiling it on the tiny three burner stove, and sleeping conditions must have been pretty cramped. (no wonder it would be two more years before my last-but-not-least sister came to join the family!)

It was just one big adventure for us kids. Playing in dirt piles all day long, running through the house that had yet to have walls, just the roughed in framework that outlined the soon to be rooms. climbing up and down the ladders to get from one level to the other, an sneaking the thick, green, glass bottles of Coke after the other workers, my dad’s friends, had gone home. Oh! the taste of that old Coke in the bottles!! That fizzy, creamy, yet spicy flavor!

We weren’t allowed to drink Coke, Mom didn’t want us to have caffeine. So we would have to sneak a bottle opener from one of the three tiny drawers in the camp trailer, and be careful that no one could see us climbing down the ladder to the basement where my dad’s friends kept their Cokes. We would sit there on the cold cement floor and enjoy every sip, then carefully put the bottle back in the carton, so it could be recycled with the other empty bottles.

Pretty sure we were a bundle of joy to try to sleep with in that cramped space after we had gotten high as a kite on the caffeine that we weren’t supposed to have.

That’s why mom made Kool-aid all the time for us. She would make a big yellowish Tupperware pitcher of it and I would help her take the gold plastic cups to the house to serve the guys that were working. I still smell saw dust mixed with hard working man’s salty skin, when I drink pink lemonade. That was the flavor she would most often make for Dad and his friends. Mom was quite the woman. She had four little rugrats that were probably covered in grime and dirt, (and little sticky droplets of Coke) to feed breakfast lunch and dinner to, we had to drive about 10 miles away to the laundry mat once a week, and she still made sure the men had a refreshing lemonade drink and a sandwich for lunch each day.

These memories came flooding back to me today when I drove past the building that our salon will be in that is now under construction. I was so excited to see the progress that was happening, I saw the workers up on the scaffolding, mudding the outside of the building getting it ready for the stucco, and I thought to myself, “That makes me so happy to see them getting the job done, I should go make them some Kool-aid.”

From my instagram post:

So excited to see the progress of our building!! I drove by and saw the guys working on the exterior and it almost brought me to tears. Tears of thanks of course. I’m so thankful​ to have been given this opportunity to grow. GLO BEAUTY STUDIOS! COMING SOON TO PLEASANT GROVE UTAH!!