I suppose I should start in the beginning, even though this starts in the 80s. I'll go back to the 70s later, but for now I'll just say I was born in 1967 in Salt Lake City and then moved with my parents to Kansas City where my Dad went to school to get his Masters. In 1980 we moved back to Utah to Hyrum in the beautiful northern Utah to Cache Valley. We moved back to be close to family. My Dad's mom lived in Rexburg about 2.5 hours north and my Mom's parents still lived in the town she grew up in Logan, which was in Cache Valley about 10 minutes away.
Our moving truck pulled up at our house : 122 West 200 North in the summer during the evening hours. I remember the house having a huge back yard and us running through the grass to the big backyard swing made of railroad ties and tripping in the ditch that cut halfway through the lawn. Hyrum (a town of 5000 people) was still quite rural and still used irrigation water rights to water your lawn and garden. Each week (maybe twice) on a rotating basis you got your water rights, a time of several hours when the water would be diverted from someone upstream to your irrigation ditches and you would use "gates" to block off or redirect water into your ditches and then flood your lawn and garden. Gates were improvised from big pieces of plastic nailed to 2 by 4's or sometimes there were culverts with built in metal gates to restrict water flow. If the water wasn't flowing sometimes you'd have to "walk up stream" and find your neighbors gate that wasn't open and remove it to let the water flow. Sometimes your water rights rotation would come in the middle of the night from like 2am to 4 am, I still recall my Dad mentioning he was tired because he'd been up moving the water.
Another initial memory was that our kitchen had a microwave. That was novel and new. I'd heard of microwaves but we'd never had one. I still remember we got two pieces of white bread and put cheese between them and microwaved up a grilled cheese sandwhich. The novelty of the experience did not live up to the taste of a soggy wilted "gilled chese" sandwhich.
I drove by our house many years after we'd left and its hard to believe that 6 kids and 2 adults fit in there and 2 more kids would come into the family. I've lots more memories of the 80s but we'll start with these two and see if I can keep them coming.
mbg
12/29/2018