Seven Words You Never Want to Hear by Denise Wilson

And of course we have to tell them that Ralph was working that August as a counselor at a youth language camp in Minnesota while I stayed in Fargo to edit a textbook on agricultural cooperatives.īut my face burns when my ex-farmer husband then finds it necessary to comment on the blessed miracle of that editing job, given my inability to distinguish between a combine and a tractor. Certainly our listeners need to know that by 1986 Ralph and I were poverty-stricken NDSU students living in married student housing. It’s fun to explain that after our missions Ralph borrowed a hundred dollars from his brother for gas and drove 1,200 miles to visit me in Utah and to talk me into applying for graduate school in his native North Dakota. I don’t mind telling people that Ralph and I met in 1983 on our missions for our church in Finland. In fact, I rarely mention it in his presence anymore because he inevitably contributes far more information than anyone-party guest or otherwise-needs to know. Twenty-six years later I can only marvel that I was ever naive enough to inform my husband of this event. And like any good English major, I began crafting the story in a letter to my new husband, Ralph, who happened to be out of town for a few weeks.

Because I had probably just doubled the crime rate in Fargo, I figured that my story would be in hot demand at parties. Outdoor felonies were rare, exotic events that North Dakotans only heard about occasionally on the news as they huddled under blankets and around fires for refuge from either frigid winter temperatures or kamikaze summer mosquitoes. As a good Mormon girl growing up in Utah, I had never felt anything close to the adrenaline rush of being a car thief for twenty minutes, and I was pretty sure my North Dakota neighbors hadn’t either. Nobody got hurt and I didn’t have to go to jail, so after my heart rate returned to normal, I was glad for the experience. On a muggy August afternoon in Fargo, North Dakota, I accidentally stole a car. (This essay was originally published in Segullah on April 12, 2013.)

Seven Words You Never Want to Hear by Denise Wilson