Our trip to Ohio

by Mom and Dad/Grandma/Grandpa Edwards

We visited Melinda and Jeff and their children Jake, Juliette, Jolie,
and Savanna at their home in Hudson, which is able 30 miles south of
downtown Cleveland. They are a happy, healthy, and very active
family.

Upon arriving and driving through the woodlands in the Cleveland area,
we were impressed with the stunning beauty of the trees turning all
autumn shades in the October sunlight. Yellows, oranges, reds,
purples, many still green. We have many photos thanks to Mom's ready
camera. We had hoped to go somewhere this year or next where we could
see this spectacle of fall colors.

We arrived at the Jensen home in Hudson. It is a very stately and
beautiful home. All the children have their own bedrooms. Juliette
graciously, let us use her room during our stay. The home has three
floors including the basement. It has many rooms, and is elaborately
furnished. We have pictures to share. There is a large yard with
thick green grass; no snow yet. Out back there is a very large pond
or small lake with many ducks and even geese as visitors. It is a
very impressive neighborhood with friendly neighbors. All in all, an
ideal area to live in.

Jeff is doing very well in his business. He is an executive,
currently supervising a staff of engineers and researchers to design,
develop, and test a completely new line of shredders (paper) to be
marketed nationally. His company also owns and markets several
well-known lines of power tools to Home Depot. They also market
several lines of vacuum cleaners such as Hoover and Dirt Devil and
others. Jeff travels quite a lot, of course. Jeff was having
conference calls from home with his people in China during the late
night hours we were there. Then he flew to Boston for another
meeting. Such is the life of the corporate executive these days. But
it is nice that Jeff does not have to travel as much as he once did.
He can do a lot of his work from home. Jeff serves a counsellor to the
bishop in his ward.

Melinda is a busy mom. She is on the go most of the time - keeping up
with the kids and their schools, getting them to and from music
lessons, sports, etc. Home is a busy pace. The kids have friends,
school, and activities. They do a lot of school work at home,
especially Jake. One morning each week, Melinda goes to her nearby
neighbor's home to meet with about twenty other ladies. They are all
lovely Christian women who love to study the Bible. Melinda was
invited to join with them when the Jensens moved into the
neighborhood. She was warmly accepted into the group and has enjoyed
in ever since. Mom accompanied her the week we visited.

Melinda serves as counsellor in the Young Women's program of her ward.
She recently performed a role in a play put on by the Cleveland
Stake. The play is an original script written by a member of the
stake and performed by members of the stake during two weeks in the
Cleveland area this past summer. The play tells the story of the early
saints in the Kirtland area of the Church. Someday, I feel it may
become an official drama of the Church, similar to the Easter Pageant
in Mesa. Kirtland is north and east of downtown Cleveland.

Jake is a eight grader. He is active in his school and studies a lot
in his downstairs "domain" where he has his "digs". He is very
creative with digital editing and has produced several programs
including some stop motion sequences using clay characters. He has a
friend who likes to come over and work with him on his computer. Jake
is getting tall and is a very talented person.

Juliette is nearly 11 and will soon enter the young womens program
(doesn't seem possible to us). She was in the play with her mother.
Juliette has a wonderful personality and is a delight to be around.
She is a good conversationalist. I think she looks like her grandma
Jensen and that is a big compliment. She also likes to sing and had
mom play the piano while she sang.

Jolie is our little sweetheart. She is a very loving and lovable
child, a complete sweet heart. She worked on her reading skills with
her mom, before the school bus arrived, the days we were there.
Grandma also helped her and, as everyone knows, Grandma was a reading
teacher. Jolie was also in the play about Kirtland.

Savannah is the resident character. She is very energetic in all she
does. She has a very beautiful work room with bay windows looking out
on the lake. She has an abundance of paper, crayons, markers,
pencils, etc. and knows how to use them all to practice her art and
creativity. She attends kindergarten and is a very happy person, most
of the time.

The family are all home after school for dinner time. We were there
on Monday for their family night. There was a nice lesson and everyone
participated. The subject was learning to like difficult things, and
growing by learning to overcome obstacles. Everyone gave an example
which was a learning experience.

One day, Melinda drove us up the road to Kirtland, Ohio. Kirtland was
one of the first settlements of the the Church where the saints were
commanded by the Lord to go. It was where the first temple in this
dispensation was constructed. We visited the temple. We were able to
go all the way through it - there are three floors. It was bigger and
higher than I had immagined. It is owned by the Community of Christ
Church. Our guide told us many interesting things about its
construction and history. Our guide was a teen age girl.
She didn't mention all the sacrifices the saints made to construct the
temple, however. She didn't mention that the women of the Church
sacrificed their best dishes plates to be ground up and added to the
plaster that was spread on the outside walls of the temple to make
them glitter and shine. She didn't mention that during the dedication
ceremonies many saw angels and the roof of the temple appeared to be
on fire when viewed from a distance. She didn't say that the Lord
himself and other ancient prophets appeared to the Prophet Joseph and
Oliver Cowdery on the breastwork of the pulpits in the upper room of
the temple. But we knew it because it is recorded in the Doctrine and
Covenants, section 110).

We then visited the Newel K. Whitney store and workshops in Kirtland.
He was a merchant who had started a flourishing business on his
property. His store was in reality and supply center for those
settling in the area. He also had a sawmill and ashery where he
produced potash. Whitney was a illustrious man. He had been a
prosperous merchant on the scene in Kirtland for a good number of
years. He was also religiously inclined and had been praying to find
a religion for his family. When the Prophet Joseph arrived at the
store, he got off his horse, strode into the store, and said to Newel,
"I am the Prophet Joseph. You have prayed me here, now what do you
want of me?" So Joseph taught him the Gospel and he and alll his
family were shortly baptised in the millstream which was dammed up to
make a pool big enough for immersion. It is a great story. One of
the greatest in the history of Kirtland, I think. Whitney was a
remarkeable man. Shortly after becoming member of the Church, he gave
(consecrated) his store, all of his goods, the mill, the ashery and
the property to the Church to be used by Joseph and the bretheren
saw fit. It became, in effect, the first welfare center for the young
Church. Most of the converts who were arriving there had nothing
materially. So they drew what they needed from Whitney's consecrated
properties and goods. But there was work for all and all worked.

The second floor of the Whitney store was his home, a kitchen,
bedrooms and small parlor. One of these rooms became what we now
refer to as the "School of the Prophets". This was where Joseph
taught them the pure doctrines of the Savior and the priesthood. This
is where they learned and were ordained and set apart as witnesses of
the Lord to all the world. It was from here they departed, many
(Brigham Young and Parley P. Pratt, for example, to the east and to
England as missionaries. Our guide said that many of them saw the
Savior himself in that upper room. We had a very interesting and
spiritually attuned guide and he said some things that struck me
emotionally. (This room was where Jake received the priesthood last
year). Later we left for Palmyra, NY, in our rental car. We traveled
up from Cleveland area out of Ohio, across a corner of Pennsylvania,
into western New York.

In Palmyra we visited all the cites of the restoration: The Sacred
Grove (where the leaves were falling and Grandma collected some of the
more colorful ones for the grandchildren), The Hill Cumorah where
Joseph received the plates (the hill is just off the highway as you
leave the freeway and travel north to the center of Palmyra. It was
impressed that the same four church steeples are there today as they
were in Joseph's time so many years ago (Methodist, Baptist,
Episcopal, Presbyterian churches). Downtown Palmyra must look today
as it did then. Many of the stores fronts seemed very old. We
visited the shop (now owned by the Church) where to first 5000 copies
of the Book of Mormon were printed. There was an eloborate
demonstration of the labor-intensive process by which the pages of the
manuscript of the book were printed, separated, folded, and bound. A
very impressive demonstration, illustrating how difficult it would
have been to produce all these copies in that day. The presence of a
printing press at the time in this little village would seem to be
quite unlikely. Western New York in the 1820's was the western
frontier of America. In a town like Palmyra? What a coincidence to
just happen to have a printing press, or was it? It seems the history
of the Church is full of "coincidences" doesn't it?

We also visited the Peter Whitmer Sr. farm which is about 35 miles
south of Palmyra. There we found a beautiful LDS chapel-visitors
center. They found what they believed to be the original foundation
of the cabin where the Church was organized and a replica was built
using old logs that the members of the stake cleaned and restored.
They were able to conduct a careful research to define the size and
type of construction. The cabin that now stands is said to be quite
like the original. It is small, perhaps 12 by 16 feet. There is a
fireplace which was the "kitchen". They constructed a few beds and
furnishings. It was here that the Church was organized. The main
significance of this story seems to be the broadcast that was made in
1980 from the interior of this cabin by President Kimball. It was a
remote broadcast by microwave or satellite to the studios in Salt Lake
City and then to many stake centers across the Church that could then
be linked to receive the broadcast. (Actually it was General
Conference).

On our way back to Hudson from Palmyra, we stopped again to visit
Kirtland briefly. At that time we were able to see the sawmill, the
mill pond, and the ashery. It also gave us a different perspective on
some things because the guides that day were not the same ones we had
talked to the previous week.

All in all, it was the trip of a life time for Mom and Me. We will
never forget seeing those places and feeling those feelings as we
contemplated the great struggles and sacrafices which were made to
establish the restored gospel to the earth by those early saints. It
certainly gave us cause to reflect upon the blissful and happy
conditions in which we live and served in the Church. We can only
wonder what may befall us as we move into the future as the Church
grows and prospers and we are called upon to offer our own sacrafices
in building the Kingdom.