GUARDED BY GREASEWOOD
By Sharlee Mullins Glenn
Photography: Dean Krakel, VisitUtah.com
I was 5 when I was born, expelled from Eden’s womb into a lone and dreary world. I made no sound, but blinked, startled by the sun-scorched ground where once bloomed wide green fields of alfalfa.
The earth had swallowed my father. They pulled his body from the inky depths of a gilsonite mine, 39.8 miles southwest of Vernal. Nothing else for miles — just this yawning hole, guarded by greasewood. (This was long before pumpjacks dotted the landscape like nodding iguanodons in that land made rich by the bones of dinosaurs, long dead.)
And then the gathering began — throngs of sturdy farm folk, some kin by blood, others by proximity. “We’re here,” they said to my mother and her seven half-orphaned children.
And they were.
Sharlee Mullins Glenn has published articles, poetry, criticism and short stories in periodicals ranging from The Southern Literary Journal and Women’s Studies to Ladybug and The New York Times. Her children’s books include “Just What Mama Needs” and “Library on Wheels: Mary Lemist Titcomb and America’s First Bookmobile,” which is winner of the 2020 Norman A. Sugarman Children’s Biography Honor Award. Glenn and her husband have five above-average children and six (soon to be seven) perfect grandchildren.