Author: Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Things are never as simple as they seem at first. San Diego is certainly the paradise it was billed, although I do live in constant fear of being run down by a phalanx of SUV’s, or worse, giving one an unmentionably expensive dent. It is beautiful here to be sure, and we love our five minute commute to the beach. But we were in the park the other day and met another family with a little girl our little girl’s age. They’d just returned to the States from Japan. And they want to go right back. Why was a little ambiguous, just like what we were feeling ourselves.… Read more

Funny, this time was different from last time. I had another miscarriage. “Chemical pregnancy,” they like to call it. This time I got a positive pregnancy test. That night though, I lay in bed awake after Axa’s midnight “milky time” and knew I was going to miscarry again. I feel differently this time. Maybe because I didn’t quite feel ready to have another baby. It was a little scary and kind of unreal to be pregnant again, although why a second baby should be scarier than a first, I don’t know. Maybe in my heart I knew I shouldn’t get excited prematurely.… Read more

When I was a little girl, I lived in San Diego. To me, it was more than a place — it was a world. It was a feeling of security, a way of life I loved. Even as a child, I felt that these wide beaches, cool breezes, and endless sunkist days were somehow my birthright. I felt anchored here. It was home, the only one I remembered, although I’d been born miles and a world away, in winter. For my parents, it must have been different. They spent a difficult four years here in a one bedroom apartment on USCD campus with three little children on a medical student’s nonexistent income, seeing each other only between classes, labs, and grueling exams.… Read more

This year I felt it was high time for us to have our own holiday, just ourselves. We love visiting family, but we like having our own traditions, too. We chose Thanksgiving, since it’s a holiday of which we’re both quite fond. My siblings Hannah and Benjamin completed our little party of five. The Sunday beforehand, we gathered for a planning meeting, at which it was decided that we would NOT have yams with marshmallows. We divvied up the assignments for different dishes, borrowed a neighbor’s house key so we could have two ovens, and departed in anticipation of the big day.… Read more

I went to Egypt a few years ago, and I keep having these flashbacks lately. Of riding the elevator up that huge, lotus-shaped monument the Russians built, of eating falafel burgers at McDonalds, of counting the Goddess Hathor statuettes at the National Museum. Of the day the deaf man I’d never met proposed marriage to me from across the street in unmistakable sign language.

Of course I saw the Pyramids, the Sphinx, the Nile, and the new library they were building in Alexandria. But the moments that bubble back to the surface and form my sense of the place are smaller things.… Read more

Fall awakens something in the heart. I wrote my first poem when I was six years old, sitting in a tree in autumn. I wrote of the falling leaves, and the advent of winter. I felt, even then, an ominous, enchanted something in the air.

The mountains around my valley become brilliantly articulate in the fall. The scarlet leaves cry out the impermanence of life, but the hills stand behind them, solid and everlasting. Watching them is like listening to an Irish flute lilting a light, wistful dance over the steady beat of the bodhran. Autumn touches the transcendent, melancholy shiver of mortality in us.… Read more

I love to write, but at best I’ve been a spotty journal-writer all my life. Perhaps I didn’t see the point of writing it just for myself. And the thought of my children (or other more distant posterity) reading what I’d written just for myself was even more unsettling. The fact that I feel better about what I write hurtling out into some nebulous land of random readers may say something about my sanity. Personal blogs demand a sort of sanctioned exhibitionism from their authors.

I grew up without school, went to college in Provo, Utah, studied abroad in Damascus, Syria, served an LDS mission in Santiago, Chile, and got married in San Diego, California.… Read more