Mid-January, Rusty and I decided to meet in Vegas, then drive to Cedar City, Utah. Don't ask me why two non-skiers agreed to visit Bev and Doug in what must be the frigidaire of the nation in mid-January.
So cold and windy, the icicles had a tendency to freeze with a finger like intensity. Our hosts provided relaxation, endless hours of fascinating conversation, coffee, wine, great food and a disarming warmth hard to pull off with the cold looming at the back door.
Gail, my closest high school friend and keeper of all of my secrets from the past, flew in from Idaho. Everyone in the family now lives in the area. I've always considered myself fortunate in that I have two equally wonderful families from which to draw my history and values. From Bev and Doug and the entire Everett clan I draw unconditional love, mutual respect and a sense of wonder for the ordinary and the extraordinary in life. Part of what I am and what I may become can be attributed to lots of coffee chats at the house on Knox Avenue in Ventura.
To finish this up, I also want to include a few mini photos from the trip. The first is of Di and Owen (affectionatly known as Auntie Di) What a wonderfully odd and excessively fun couple. Di helped me acquire my first job working with children at the YMCA afterschool "camp".The second is of Bev, Doug, and Maggie (an ethereal strange angel with as fascinating a history as one can hope for in this short 90 years walking the planet) at Rusty's Roadhouse,
and finally their crazy K-9 who insists on sitting on any piece of furniture in the room (no matter if the surface area of his behind matches the available surface area of the furniture). Quirky? Yes. Very Everett? Precisely. Thank you Bev and Doug for hosting and for sitting through a good sixty minutes of me going on and on about my dissertation (as Rusty says, "Blah, blah...Queer Theory...blah, blah identity management...."- he has a point!) until we meet again, I certainly will miss you both.
So cold and windy, the icicles had a tendency to freeze with a finger like intensity. Our hosts provided relaxation, endless hours of fascinating conversation, coffee, wine, great food and a disarming warmth hard to pull off with the cold looming at the back door. 
Gail, my closest high school friend and keeper of all of my secrets from the past, flew in from Idaho. Everyone in the family now lives in the area. I've always considered myself fortunate in that I have two equally wonderful families from which to draw my history and values. From Bev and Doug and the entire Everett clan I draw unconditional love, mutual respect and a sense of wonder for the ordinary and the extraordinary in life. Part of what I am and what I may become can be attributed to lots of coffee chats at the house on Knox Avenue in Ventura.
