Ann's Words

Uncle Franklin and Aunt Anne, Wilfred and Marietta, cousin Teresa

Uncle Wilfred with 3 granddaughters and a his great-grandson

My Uncle Wilfred turned 90 on October 12th.  My Dad is the oldest of 3 brothers, Henry, Wilfred and Franklin.  Here are a few pics the family sent of Wilfred’s birthday celebration.

Uncle Wilfred with daughters, Elly and Donna

My name’s Richard. I’m 74. I sometimes think our generation is the bridge between two worlds — one made of dirt roads and handwritten letters, the other made of satellites and screens in our pockets.

I was born in a house without air conditioning. Summer meant open windows and the hum of a box fan. We knew the neighbors by name, and if your bike chain broke, you knocked on any door until someone found a wrench. We grew up on patience — waiting for the mail, waiting for the library to open, waiting for the radio to play our favorite song again.

Then the world sped up. Phones shrank, music became invisible, and the news didn’t take days to reach us — it arrived in our palms before we finished breakfast. We learned to type, to swipe, to tap. We learned to talk to machines and have them talk back. We learned… because we always had to.

We’ve seen milk delivered to the door in glass bottles, and we’ve scanned groceries without a cashier. We’ve dropped coins in payphones and made video calls across oceans. We’ve known the sound of silence — no buzzing notifications — and the sound of an entire world pinging at once.

Sometimes younger folks think we’re behind. But here’s what I know: our generation knows both worlds. We can plant tomatoes and write an email. We can tell a story without Google, and then fact-check ourselves with it. We know the weight of a handwritten letter because we’ve held it, and we know the reach of a message sent in seconds because we’ve pressed “send” and watched a reply arrive from thousands of miles away.

We are proof that you can change without losing yourself. That you can honor where you came from while learning where the world is going.

We’ve buried friends and welcomed grandchildren. We’ve watched diseases disappear and new ones arrive. We’ve known paper maps and GPS, postcards and emojis, patience and immediacy.

And maybe that’s our real gift — we carry the memory of a slower, quieter world, and the skills to navigate the fast, loud one. We can teach the young that not everything needs to happen instantly… and remind the old that it’s never too late to try something new.

We are the bridge. The middle chapter. The link between what was and what will be.

Tomorrow we are leaving for a family trip to Hilton Head, South Carolina, where we will meet up with Adam’s family.  Claire’s family is also flying there to join us.  Today I brought in the last of the garden produce to make ready for winter.   I’m sad there won’t be time to eat everything.  I chopped and froze what I could for soup season during the cold months.

The basil went in the blender and then into cupcake tins before freezing it.  These bags will add a bit of summer freshness to my cooking when the skies are dark.

Today I had lunch with two very dear friends, Elizabeth Hoffman and Angela Cottrell.  These good women were my Ministering Angels a few years ago and I love them.

Last night an interesting thing happened. Our son, Aaron dropped by yesterday afternoon while I was out at the pool. I was in our single-lane lap pool swimming my mile on this cool fall day when he showed up.  After a quick visit, Aaron left to go see John, who was planting Vinca in front of the Farm House.

Our little family communicates by SnapChats every day. The kids send snaps to our phones of their kids, and as Grandparents, we watch them grow up from afar.

Last night as John and I watched our family SnapChats, Aaron had posted a short video clip of me swimming. I stared at it, realizing that for the first time ever in my life, I saw my own self swimming!

When I was a little girl, my Mom took us to the Reedley Swimming Pool every day for swim lessons. We started in the kiddie pool blowing bubbles and kicking our feet. We graduated to deeper parts of the pool as we got older. By the time I was 7, I was on the swim team. By the time I was 8, I set my first 2 of many records in the Central Valley Championship swim meets.

I competed seriously for the next 12 years or so, swimming for the Reedley Marlins, State Center Swim Club (AAU) and CHAOS Swim Club (AAU). I was a High School All-American Swimmer and participated in dozens of Jr. Olympic meets. When I went to BYU, I retired from being on a swim team, but I swam on a championship intramural team for a few years.

In all those years, no one had video cameras. There was no technology to capture us on film, to study our strokes and turns. The closest I ever got to seeing myself swim was the year our State Center Swim Club went to the Keo Nakama Invitational Swim Meet in Hawaii. It was the year the movie “Jaws” came out. The night before we flew to Hawaii, many of the kids on the team went to see “Jaws.” When we arrived in Hawaii the next day and had a few hours on Waikiki Beach before the meet started, no one who had seen the movie put a toe in the water. I determined then that I would never watch that movie (and I never have). I did not ever want to be scared to swim!

At that swim meet, my coach Tom Tyner, noticed a girl, about my same size and build. We had the exact same gold, orange and brown swimsuit on. At one point, in a race, he was cheering for her, calling her by my name. I tapped his shoulder and said, “I’m here, not there!” He was shocked. He said, not only did that girl look like me, her stoke looked exactly like mine. I sat there with him watching her swim, wondering if that really was what I looked like.

One of my dreams for Heaven is to watch the movies of Ann Laemmlen swimming, competing and setting records. I would LOVE to watch and cheer my little self on. I would like to see what those races looked like and how I moved so fast through the water. I only have a few old newspaper clippings and photos of myself when Valley records were broken and new records set.

For a few seconds last night, I got to see my old 66 year-old self swimming. I’m not so fast anymore, but I still love moving through the water while imagining my young strong swimmer’s body doing what it once did.

Here’s a collection of my blue ribbons from my childhood swim meets.  They are all labeled with dates, times and places.

Many years ago, in the 1970s, my mom asked “Aunt Ada” to make some quilts for our family.  Ada Flory Lundquist was the second wife of my Great-grandpa Emanuel Lundquist who had first married Grace Honor Bushman, my Great-grandma.

These are two of the quilts that came to our family from Aunt Ada, who made them in her later years.  Ada was born in 1883 in West Virginia and she lived to be 89 years old.  She died in Los Angeles in 1973 when I was in 8th grade.

My bedroom was decorated in lavender with a floral bedspread and matching hand towels.  My mom asked Ada to make a lavender quilt for me.  By the time she made these quilts, her eyesight was poor.  Fabrics were scrappy and didn’t always match and her stitches were uneven and full of character.  But I loved my Aunt Ada Quilt and used it well.

This is another quilt she made for us.  The patches are made from clothing scraps and the binding wraps around to the front.  These old quilts have a lot of charm because they tell stories about the lives of their makers.

Here’s a photo of Aunt Ada at one of our annual “Family Picnics” in southern California.  I’m sitting between my cousins, Cheryl and Debbie Martell, on the right.  Ada had 3 daughters:  Mary, Edna and Vicki and a son named Reed.

Edna, Mary and Vicki with their mother, Ada Flory Lundquist and a quilt she made.

Edna, Mary and Vicki with Aunt Ada

Last week we had a very fun visit from Chris and Jacque Feinauer, who were our cohorts in the Communication Department in the Europe Central Office in Frankfurt.  We worked together, played together and traveled together.

Today we and a few other couples on this side of the ocean went to hear their homecoming talks at their home ward in South Jordan.  We all had a delightful afternoon, catching up and enjoying each other’s company.

I will say it again–mission friends are the best of friends!

As we dealt with the sadness of President Nelson’s death last night, we woke to this news this morning.  A man drove his truck into an LDS chapel in Michigan, then started shooting people in the congregation.  He also set the church on fire and it burned to the ground.  It was stunning and horrific news on this already sad Sabbath morning.

Here is an update from Monday:

Everyone now accounted for after attack on Michigan church left 4 dead, officials say

By Chris Boyette, Holly Yan, Zoe Sottile, Danya Gainor and Elizabeth Wolfe, CNN
Updated 12:29 AM EDT, Tue September 30, 2025

What we covered here
• All the missing have been accounted for a day after a gunman rammed a truck into a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints chapel in Michigan, began shooting, then set a fire that destroyed the building.

• Four people were killed and eight others injured in the attack during a Sunday morning service. Some of the injured were shot, while others suffered from smoke inhalation.

• The gunman was “take(n) down” by officers within minutes. Investigators identified him as Thomas Jacob Sanford, 40, who served with the Marines and was an Iraq War veteran. His family is cooperating as the FBI investigates the attack as an act of targeted violence.

• The siege was among 324 mass shootings this year in the US and the latest place of worship – from a Catholic church in Minneapolis to a synagogue in Pittsburgh and a Sikh temple in Wisconsin – devastated by American gun violence.

This last week we’ve had the very fun pleasure of hosting Christina and Barbara, our friends from Switzerland.  John and his mission buddies taught their mother 50 years ago when these girls were small.  We’ve kept in touch all these years.  Friendships like these are dear to us.

Missions are the best.  I believe when we are willing to go and serve, Heavenly Father puts special people in our paths who enrich and bless our lives forever more.