Author: Timothy Willis

Dear Family, Family lore holds that a 1970s trip to see some Indian ruins while we were in Utah for a Willis reunion had to be cut short when some boy (perhaps me, perhaps someone my age with a similar temperament) threw a fit because a) driving for hours to look at old rocks you’re…

Dear Family, Earlier this month, precisely 15 years, 2 months, and 29 days after Crystal and I got into the business of being parents to teenagers, we finally left that chapter behind by celebrating Grace’s 20th birthday. We marked the occasion (sort of — technically we were a week early) by driving down to Lexington,…

Dear Family, For Christmas, I gave Crystal one of those overpriced “Adventure Bucket List” things they sell on Facebook to people with no impulse control. Maybe you’ve seen the ads. It’s basically a box of 50 large scratch-off cards — kind of like the lottery tickets they sell at gas stations, except instead of winning…

Dear Family, On or about Wednesday, January 8th, Hannah married Emma Porter during a small ceremony in their apartment in Orem, Utah. I never expected I would devote the first sentence of two consecutive monthly letters to announcing the marriages of two of my daughters, but here we are. Until relatively recently, I never expected…

Dear Family, Sophie married Luke Wonnacott shortly before noon on Friday in the Washington D.C. Temple. The rest of the month is kind of a blur. It’s New Year’s Eve and I don’t have a lot of time to write, but let’s see what I can remember. Apart from being a last-minute addition to the…

Dear Family, Crystal learned this month that if you need a good spine surgeon, it’s really helpful to be Roland Kent’s sister. If you are a faithful reader of my letters (and have a good memory) you already know that Crystal’s back surgery last spring — performed by a surgeon more conveniently located to us…

Dear Family, Hopefully all of you have learned by now that if you don’t want the details of your latest health challenges chronicled on the internet, then you’re probably better off not sharing them with me. I have genuine concern for how you’re doing — and I’m actually good at keeping secrets. But you have…

Dear Family, Riding my bike to work in the rain multiple times this week brought to mind a cherished childhood memory that I sometimes wonder whether my mother remembers the same way I do. The distance from my childhood home in Moorestown, New Jersey, to the middle and high school I attended (the two schools’…

Note: For the latest from Sophie (including her rhapsodic musings about Riga, her harrowing journey from Latvia to Utah to Alaska and then back to Utah, and her always-exciting adventures working at the BYU Bindery, read here. For an account of Ari’s summer as a counselor at Science Camp and Adventure Camp and dealing with…

Dear Family, One of the downsides of writing a letter at the end of every month is that important events at the beginning of the month tend to get short shrift, if not forgotten entirely. This is definitely shaping up to be one of those months, especially since almost all of this letter is being…