when i was a little girl growing up in the lush green rain valleys of the pacific northwest i used to look forward to the one week every summer when my father would pile us all into whatever precursor to the mormon assault vehicle we owned at the moment and embark on the almost non-stop and all-through-the-night (then) 18-hour drive to utah. (the drive is shorter now, but still almost as long as the preceding sentence.)

one of my favorite parts of the journey–besides looking out the window at a star-filled universe that could just about swallow me up–was driving through logan canyon on our way to grandpa’s ranch in randolph. as much as i love the green of oregon, my heart is equally enamored with the red, red dirt found in many parts of utah. it’s one of the beauties of this earth that is so overwhelming to me it almost makes my heart hurt just from taking it in (i also feel this way about gazing into joy-filled faces of children).

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so my daughter plays softball. i love softball as much as i love baseball (cue the don henley song). what i don’t love is that her high school team wears white uniforms. and plays on red dirt.

last week they had a game on that very rainy tuesday. a game that, you know, should have been called. you know, on account of all that rain. but it was only the second game of the season and everyone was hungry for play. so they played. with standing water on the field. which, when properly churned up by the determined sprinting to base of cleat-clad athletes, quickly became mud.

and all of a sudden the once pristine uniforms were red, not white. and my daughter was reading the laundry instructions out loud: wash in cold water. do not bleach.

um yeah, right.

i called another softball mom (her daughter is a junior–so she knows) how she got the white pants clean.

“white pants are the worst idea ever. i’ve tried everything,” she said. “the only way you can get them clean is to use some hot water and a little bleach.”

i scrubbed suze’s pants down with a broken bar of fels naptha (best stain remover eveh) and tossed them in with a regular load of whites on my “whitest whites” cycle. (hot water, and um, yeah, a little bleach.) honestly, whatever inches thick of synthetic that can withstand steals and slides of a softball player ought to be tough enough to take on a little bleach.

suze came down just before the washing machine completed its work. “it smells like bleach,” she remarked. i pleaded the fifth on that one and, just a few minutes later pulled out a pair of softball pants so clean and so sparkling white (white than some famous utah celebrities’ teeth) i had to reach for my favorite pair of sunglasses.

“i am a goddess,” i thought out loud. and, just for that one moment (because generally i get a big FAIL for laundry), i was.

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last weekend, after a HUGE storm in st. george (and i’m speaking actually and metaphorically here), the sun came out and dried up all the rain. then our little family went for a drive. and we ended up at one of my favorite places on earth, snow canyon:

never been there? i recommend you go next time you’re down south. it’s gorgeous.