Dear Family,
It’s crazy to think that my wedding dress shopping experience was just at the beginning of September; it feels like it was ages ago now. But after my experience looking at wedding dresses in Latvia, I got together two of my best friends who were with me for that experience and had them join me for a shopping trip that was more likely to result in me actually buying something.
There’s something unexpectedly thrilling about trying on wedding dresses. I’m not a fan of clothes shopping generally, and I also don’t like importuning people. Having my two friends sit for an hour for the sole purpose of watching me prance around in front of them in various white dresses and say things like, “this one just feels…(meh/scratchy/piratey/like I wouldn’t be able to breathe after an hour).
I’m not going to put a picture of the dress I ended up choosing, but here are a few that were contenders (featuring my watch tan line):
For all of the awkwardness of parading around in fancy dresses while everyone is watching you try to articulate why you do or don’t want to be in this particular dress on the day of your life that many consider to be the most important, it is quite a lovely experience. Ever since getting engaged, the idea of a wedding seems a little stressful and performative. I was excited to be married, but I don’t think I really felt excited to get married until I stood in front of the mirror in a really pretty white dress with two of my closest friends behind me looking so effervescently happy for me.
I imagine the real day will be even better.
Since wedding dress shopping, life has gotten a little less simple, bright, and white.
School started at the beginning of September and it has been constantly tugging at my brain this last week. I enjoy my classes and feel like I’ve been learning a lot, but I am just getting a little tired. On the plus side, I don’t think I have a single midterm this semester. Possibly not even a final exam.
You might be thinking, “Sophie, you should probably know that for sure.” Maybe that’s true, but all I know right now is how many pages of reading and writing assignments I have due in the next 48 hours and that’s just about all I can handle at the moment.
Most of these assignments come from three of my six classes. The other three are a nice respite and recovery for the hour I’m sitting there, trying to absorb through osmosis all of the history, language, and skill that my professors seek for me to absorb before the next essay is due. One additional thing that I’ve chosen to pay attention to during these lectures is my professors’ fascinating prosody.
Some of my professors speak like normal people. A few others speak using expressions and sayings that are either the mark of a previous generation or a well-read individual, and while I recognize them, they have never issued from my mouth in any authentic setting. As an attempt to develop the skill of sounding obnoxiously well-educated, should I ever want to flip on that switch (an urge that nags at me every time I read one of my dad’s letters), I’ve started writing down the words and phrases that I hear in class in a separate document so that I can define, study, or simply look at them again later.
So in my efforts to craft a more belletristic letter, I’m hoping to implement some of their language into my record of September, 2024. If you notice language that makes me sound more pedantic than usual (or, more likely, more like a middle schooler whose teacher just recently exposed them to the wonders of the online thesaurus), excuse my attempts that come out too flat-footed for your taste and feel free to blame the good professors of BYU.
One professor in particular uses myriad words I’ve never heard before, most of the time at the same time that she adjusts her glasses. She is also an ardent fan of Anne Bradstreet, who is starting to become a special favorite of mine as well.
For those who don’t know Anne Bradstreet, she is a poet from colonial Massachusetts whose most famous work, “The Tenth Muse” was an early best-selling piece of American Literature. I highly recommend reading some of her work if you haven’t before, because it is clever, beautiful, and such a sweet window into the life and faith of an early American woman. The poems published during her life show how informed and well-educated she was, while poems published later reveal how much she loved God and her family.
In a letter to her children as she was approaching death, she wrote about her hardships in life. She confesses to difficulty and doubts in the same lines that she thanks God for the strength He gives her:
“I have often been perplexed that I have not found that constant joy in my pilgrimage and refreshing which I supposed most of the servants of God have…But when I have been in darkness and seen no light, yet have I desired to stay myself upon the Lord, and when I have been in sickness and pain, I have thought if the Lord would but lift up the light of His countenance upon me, although He ground me to powder, it would be but light to me; yea, oft have I thought were I in hell itself and could there find the love of God toward me, it would be a heaven.”
Isn’t that such a touching way of describing the feeling that so many people of faith have? I don’t know about you, but I can think of a few times where I’ve wondered on the joy of the Saints and felt a little insecure about the fact that I couldn’t honestly claim my current situation as particularly felicitous. But then to share with her children that the feeling of love she feels from God has been so powerful and so comforting to her. I just think her work is beautiful, and she produces the rare 17th century work of literature that valorizes motherhood and the trials of an average woman in colonial America.
She’s a sweetie and I love her.
Then there’s my other class where we talk about contemporary American literature and the death of the author. Very different feeling in there, but still a lot of fun.
But that’s enough of school. Even as I’ve been doing my best to codify all of my assignments and responsibilities into a responsible schedule, I still managed to find time to crawl away from my computer for perhaps an irresponsible amount of time on week nights and weekends alike, hopefully not to the diminution of my grades (but necessary for the maintanence of my mental health).
Thankfully, even when I would choose rot in front of my empty google documents all day and night, Luke and assorted other friends and family have an activity that will drag me into the sunlight for a few hours. At the beginning of the month, I camped with some girlfriends on the salt flats, Luke and I went on a hike to the hot springs in Spanish Fork, and Hannah and Emma took me and Luke kayaking on a lake in Orem.
Luke also made our engagement photos (something I said that we should probably do about five times without actually taking any action on it) happen.
Luke also likes to make me exercise in the morning, and so we’ll play tennis, run, or, on one occasion, pick apples.
The last one wasn’t particularly strenuous, but it was fun.
There’s this house a few blocks down from Luke’s apartment that has three fruit trees in the front yard and apples and pears strewn all over the grass. Unable to turn down a good deal and frustrated by the social contract that prevented him from simply taking some of this fruit from the trees every time he passed them, Luke decided to leave a note on the front door of the house attached to the fruit tree property, asking whether he could take some of the fruit from the trees.
He left the note on the door, walked away, and fifteen minutes later received permission from the owner to take as much advantage as he wished of the under-utilized fruit trees.
So we picked apples and pears until we had enough that Luke didn’t know what to do with them. Most of them remained in his kitchen until last week, when we made two apple pies.
This whole experience taught me one thing, and that is that Luke doesn’t ascribe validity to the claim that some apples are better for baking than others, which is probably a good thing to know about a person before marrying him. But he also knows how to make a very good pie crust, and I’ll admit that the two things balance each other out.
I also got to attend a lovely birthday party this month for my good friends, Tommy Eskelsen. Most of you know the Eskelsens as that one family that my family posts a picture with every June or so as a part of our Maryland smith island cake tradition. Tommy and his fiancée, Lola, have also become very good friends to both me and Luke while we’ve been at school together.
Lola texted a small group of Tommy’s friends early this month, inviting us to Tommy’s surprise party a few weeks later. During those weeks of suspense, the idea of it evidentially percolated in all involved parties’ minds and, due to an ill-timed text message to Lola while she was hanging out with Tommy, he figured out that there was a party planned in his honor, but he didn’t know when the party would be.
Luke and I offered to pick up pizza and bring it to the party before Tommy got there, but we ran into a little problem when we were waiting to cross the street to get to Lola’s apartment and we saw Tommy standing twenty feet away from us, waiting to cross the street the same street from the other side of the intersection. My mind raced to find a solution to this problem, and I gave Tommy a friendly wave and told Luke to walk straight once we crossed the street instead of turning right. After all, we could be carrying pizzas to any number of locations that were not Lola’s apartment, and maybe we were in too much of a hurry to get there to talk extensively with Tommy about it.
Tommy seemed to elucidate this intended meaning out of our actions and continued on his way without suspicion. What did arouse his suspicion was when he saw through scrubby Utah bushes us jogging across an adjacent parking lot in an attempt to get to Lola’s before he did.
Luke remained determined to get there before he did, but I, having seen the text that he sent to our group chat, couldn’t keep running because I was laughing too hard.
We did arrive there before Tommy did, and he very graciously accepted our boisterous welcome the minute he walked in the door. Since it turned out the surprise had already been spoiled a few weeks before, I didn’t feel too bad about our failed attempt at stealth. Lola put on a great party and, after all, it put quite the entertaining image into the minds of everyone involved.
Well, I used all the words I wrote down, so I guess I’ll end it there. I actually didn’t get to use the word “fetid,” nor the expressions “a yard of mulch,” and “the big hummer,” largely because “fetid” seemed too unpleasant a word to describe any of my experiences this month and the other two…well, I can’t seem to ascribe them any sensible meaning even after a thirty-second google search.
If you got this far into what was a somewhat hectic letter, I hope you are all doing well and that you have the chance to read some Anne Bradstreet this month. Thank you for loving and supporting me always, and I’m excited for the next time I get to talk to you.
All the love,
Sophie
Senior Contributor to The Famlet Monthly