October

Today woke up feeling like October. It’s drizzling outside and there’s one tree out the front window that’s turning red, way ahead of the rest of the trees on the street.

I feel like I’m in Beloit again for some strange reason. Beloit was the first place I was sent to on my mission, a sagging little town just inside Wisconsin where I spent my first October. We had days like today and we would bike across the river through the lifeless one-street downtown to a designated area and start knocking. Sister Plunkett loved the wildlife preserve nearby so on one P-day on a day like today we got on our jeans and ponchos and just biked around the preserve on dirt trails.

Sometimes I don’t feel like I accomplished much in that first area because I had no idea what I was doing and I was only there for six weeks. Sister Plunkett was an English sister and I was a Spanish hermana which meant we were ‘zebra striping’ the area and I pretty much had to take on all the Spanish work speaking by myself. We were also both new to the area which meant we were ‘whitewashing’ it. Even though Sister Plunkett had served there before, it had been awhile and they’d combined her old area to another one to make the current area we were in. The zebra stripe whitewashing thing was hard (even though zebra stripe whitewashing sounds funny when you picture it). It was Sister Plunkett’s last transfer.

But even though it seems hard looking back on it, I loved being Sister Plunkett’s companion and learned a lot from her. She had been baptized a year before going on a mission and told me how she was scared to go back–“I’ve spent more time as a missionary than a normal member!”  But she’s awesome and spunky and full of a strong testimony and last I heard she was doing great, having just gotten married in the San Diego temple. I loved her testimony–she would always say, “This is so incredible! This is Christ’s church!”

We met some interesting people in Beloit. People were always telling us, “Be careful! This is a dangerous neighborhood.” But luckily the biggest trouble we ran into was a group of high school kids after dark who were looking for their high school teacher’s house to toilet paper it, all in good fun because their teacher was awesome like that. Their teacher happened to be our ward mission leader so we said we’d tell them where it was if they  took our passalong cards. We figured it was a good exchange, and the ward mission leader really was awesome so he’d get a good laugh out of it.

One day knocking we met a Hispanic lady named Ampelia with her two kids. She was very nice and let us in, but after the first couple visits she said her priest didn’t want her taking the lessons with us. We were all sad, Ampelia included, so we agreed to just help her learn English so we could at least keep in contact with her because she had a special inviting spirit about her. Those visits were very good, and I was so happy to find out that the English sisters and elders continued them after we left.  I’ve continued writing letters back and forth with Ampelia and she sent me a letter this week with her phone number, so we talked on the phone a couple days ago, the first time in almost three years.  That was a very cool experience.

I guess that’s what the rainy morning made me think about today.