I’ve been feeling this mixture of melancholy, family love, joy and curiosity. A couple of weeks ago, I got word that my Uncle Lou, my mom’s brother, passed away. He was 92. He’s the boy, holding the dog, in the photo above. My mom was the baby of the family, the littlest girl in the photo. I got to go to the funeral for Uncle Lou this past weekend. Wow, what a wonderful, emotional trip down memory lane. The funeral was held in a little town in southern Nevada, called Overton, where my mom and uncle grew up.

She grew up playing with cousins a lot because her dad had brothers who lived there and worked with him as farmers. She still has a lot of relatives living there, including cousins, nieces, and some of their descendants. As a kid we made a trek to this town to see my grandparents once or twice a year, either at Easter, or Thanksgiving. If we were really lucky we got to make the outing for both holidays each year. We had a bunch of cousins who lived there as well. One bunch of cousins, Uncle Lou’s family, lived behind my grandparents. It was super fun to go back and forth between the houses, through a gate in the backyard fence. Then my grandparents built a new house, their dream house, that was about two blocks away. It was a mansion compared to their old home. What fun we had there as well!

The whole town was just a magical wonderland. It was always either hot or hotter, having no winter with the nasty cold, wind, hail, sleet, or snow of Utah. I only remember it raining once in all my visits there. The place boasted palm trees, red rocks, mountains, and strange, rare tropical fruit called pomegranates that grew on trees in people’s yards. This wonderland was so warm that one of our great aunts used a golf cart as her main mode of transportation. Imagine! This all seemed like something straight out of a fairy tale story book.

One time when I visited, I got to play with kittens, at my grandparents’ home. How delightful! I never knew creatures could have so much fun with just a piece of yarn. All the other times the fun animals featured were Uncle Lou’s cats and his two dogs (George and Cocoa). He had so many cats, I can’t remember their names. It totally doesn’t surprise me he is holding a dog in the top photo, as he had such a huge love for having animals as friends. Amongst the photos displayed at the funeral was a framed photo of one of the cats.

This magical place also had a porch swing, and a trampoline at Uncle Lou’s home. Often, we found inside a treasure trove of piles of comic books featuring Archie and Lulu. Such things did not exist at our home. Beyond his home, the town had swimming pools, a movie theater, friendly people, and loads of cousins, (first cousins, second cousins, first cousins once removed, and probably other iterations I don’t even know about). All of this amounted to lots of play, play, play. I have such fond memories of the whole place. It wasn’t Uncle Lou, but a different one, who owned a hamburger joint on the main drag called “The Desert Freeze.” It was in front of his and my aunt’s home. My siblings and cousins loved going there to get soft serve ice cream. It was a long walk, but we could walk from the cousins’ home to the Desert Freeze. The hot air of the desert surrounded us like an oven, which made the ice cream even tastier.

In this time of the late ’70s, we, my siblings and cousins, loved watching the Muppet Show in my grandparents’ big living room on their big TV. These cousins were the children of Uncle Lou. To this day, any time my kids watch a Muppet movie, the music takes me back to that living room with the happy feeling of cousins watching with the adults in the nearby dining room talking and laughing. All was well! For Christmas one year Uncle Lou and Aunt Diann and the cousins capitalized on our love of the Muppets by giving us a record album of the soundtrack of the Muppet 1971 TV special entitled, “The Frog Prince.” We played that record over and over!

Sometimes we got to go visit Lake Mead, which was nearby, and go swimming and tubing. Uncle Lou’s wife Aunt Diann had yummy brownies to eat on those lake outings. Whenever I eat the gluten-free brownies I blogged about here I think of those lake trips.

At Uncle Lou’s house, which was behind my grandparents’ home, we, my sisters, cousin, and I, played a lot with Fisher-Price Little People. We had an elaborate ritual preceding the play. Whoever was being the most self-aware at the time would call out “first dibs.” Then the rest of us would call successive dibs. Then we would pile all the people, buildings, furniture, and cars into the middle of the playroom. Then we would take turns picking one thing from the pile, going around and around until every item was claimed.

With each mini-collection under our temporary stewardship, we would set up the town with our goods and act out fun scenarios of neighborly and domestic bliss. It seems like the cousins had all the FP Little People sets we had, like the village and the camper, plus the cooler Sesame Street and castle sets. They also had the cute blue house with the yellow roof and the groovy A-frame vacation house.

As we got older, we graduated to the more mature indoor activity of playing a lot of board games. Of course, we already knew about the run-of-the-mill fare of Monopoly, Risk, Sorry, and Clue. We had most of those. But here in this vacation cousinland we found the never-heard-of-before exotic games. It was at Uncle Lou’s house that my siblings and I learned about the word game Boggle, and the unusual, more sophisticated Parker Brother games, including Pay Day, Trust Me, Masterpiece, Billionaire, and Inventors. Overton had no big box store like Target or Walmart (I don’t think it does to this day), and this was before Amazon. Uncle Lou must have picked up these games from one of his many trips to Las Vegas. Oh, the hours of fun we had playing so many games! Inventors was my favorite. It had this cool gadget that you would use to put these metal clips on cards to represent the inventors’ patents. I still plan on finding it on one of my thrifting jaunts. I know I can buy it on etsy or ebay but I’m holding out for the thrill of finding it so much cheaper at a thrift store! It was just a few years ago that my mom told me that my dad and Uncle Lou used to pull “all-nighters” in their younger days, playing Risk together. This is all where I must get my love of board gaming! (If you’ve never read any of my stuff on using board games for homeschool, go here. If you want to read some of my board game reviews, go here.)

Sometimes we went camping with these cousins, and other cousins, like to the Grand Canyon, McCall, Idaho, or Pine Valley, Utah. One of my mom’s Overton cousins lived down the street from Uncle Lou. She had a swimming pool, so we often got to go swimming there. If we couldn’t go swimming there, we would go to the community pool. Decades later, whenever I go swimming in a chlorinated pool, the pattern of diamonds that I see in the water reflecting the sun, and the heavy chlorinated smell, usher in memories of Cousin Vacationland: palm trees, clear blue skies, sunshine, and the heavenly feeling of relatives surrounding me.

All these feelings of fun, love, family togetherness and happy memories came rushing back to me as I drove into the valley and attended Uncle Lou’s funeral with my husband this past Saturday. I love the tribute to the wisdom of a father, to Uncle Lou, that my cousins had placed at the table as we entered the viewing area. See photo below.

I love it! The tribute perfectly captures the wisdom of Uncle Lou and the grateful, respectful feeling I hope we can each feel towards goodly fathers and our Heavenly Father. It reminds me of the wisdom of good fathers and the ultimate wisdom of our Heavenly Father’s beautiful plan for each of us.

It was such a beautiful funeral. Uncle Lou was a wonderful man. He lived an ordinary life but touched people because of his love of life and his jolly personality. He was a great husband and father of 6 children. I loved hearing one of his daughters quote him as saying that the most satisfying, joyful day of his life was when he knelt across his bride at the altar in the St. George Temple and gazed into her eyes, as he was sealed to her for time and eternity by the sacred Melchizedek priesthood power.

It was fun to hear the memories shared by two of his daughters who spoke at the funeral. They shared how he loved all creatures great and small and took tender care of them. One time he was pulling a trailer with his truck down the highway, to go camping. He pulled over to gently remove a grasshopper off his windshield and deposit it safely into the grass on the side of the road. When one of his girls found that some mice had made a nest in the family’s mop, he set the mice free in a vacant field, saying goodbye to them in a squeaky high voice. He cared so much about his dogs and cats that he would taste-test the cat and dog food to make sure it would taste OK to them.

My favorite all-time memory of Uncle Lou is the time I was sitting in a math class in high school. It was the Monday after a BYU Football game. One of my close friends walked into the class late. She sheepishly confessed to me that she had missed the bus. Uncle Lou had come to her rescue by giving her a ride to school. He had been in town for the football game over the weekend, spending the nights at my childhood home. Somehow my mom heard my friend had missed the bus and got her brother to give my friend a ride to school. He didn’t even know this girl but was willing to give her a ride, just because he’s a nice guy. He was always willing to help someone out. He served faithfully in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in many callings. I am confident that he helped many people in those callings, which among them were temple worker and senior missionary.

I love that at the funeral, one of his grandsons sang the song, “I Know that My Redeemer Lives.” I too know that He lives. I am so grateful to know this, for it gives me the sure knowledge that someday, because of Jesus Christ’s redeeming power, we will see Uncle Lou again in a perfectly restored body. He will be robust with his hearing intact. The first thing my sister thought of the morning of the funeral as she awoke was, “Hey, Uncle Lou can hear again!” He suffered for a few years at the end with a loss of his hearing. His body was frail and tired. He was miserable, but now he has been released from all of his body’s limitations.

I love these Book of Mormon verses about death and resurrection. I believe these words!

“Now, concerning the state of the soul between death and the resurrection—Behold, it has been made known unto me by an angel, that the spirits of all men, as soon as they are departed from this mortal body, yea, the spirits of all men, whether they be good or evil, are taken home to that God who gave them life. And then shall it come to pass, that the spirits of those who are righteous are received into a state of happiness, which is called paradise, a state of rest, a state of peace, where they shall rest from all their troubles and from all care, and sorrow.”-Alma 40:11-12

The back cover of the funeral program had this quote from Winnie the Pooh:

“How lucky I am having something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”

Yes! Because of Jesus, it is just merely a good-bye for now, but not forever. To Uncle Lou, good-bye for now. Thank you for being a kindly wonderful dad and uncle. Thank you for contributing to joyful memories of my childhood in the Cousin Wonderland you provided as a great father and uncle. Truly this is a joyful foretaste of heaven to come!