On the sweetness of Mormon life

You shuttle back and forth from your living room to your kitchen. You bring out knives, pots, a cutting board, a small washpan, a tub of apples. A stool to put your notebook and pen on. Saturday morning. General Conference. The web stream is good, mostly. You start to cut apples; the choir starts to sing.

Your wife and daughters have their own station where they are sorting grapes from your vines. The doorbell rings. It is your dad, with another bushel of apples and a tub of his own grapes. He takes his pocketknife and joins you in cutting apples. You listen, you cut, you take a note or two and smear as little apple juice on the pages as you can, you see your wife’s containers filling with clean grapes ready for pressing, you hear her occasional comments to the children about what the apostles are teaching, you feel the quiet power of God.y
“Hey, what’s this?” Your wife says. You–all of you–have been too focused on the harvest and the speakers to notice your little son. He has taken a skein of yarn and wound it through the chairs and tables, into the kitchen, out through the other door connecting the kitchen with the living room, and around and around again. It is, you later think, a metaphor.