Saturday, Oct. 29, 2016 – Plant Tulips, Pumpkin Walk through “Boo-tiful Nauvoo,”

We enjoyed a great P-day. We started off in the morning planting our three flowerbeds with tulip bulbs. Our home here in Nauvoo has one large flowerbed by the back door and two smaller ones by the front door. Last May when all of the tulips were pulled out of the ground in Carthage, the bulbs were all given away. Sis. Johnson saved a bunch for other missionaries and some for us too. After 5 months, they will finally be back in the ground again.

Since we are from the deserts of Arizona, we don’t get to plant tulips in our flowerbeds at home. But now we work with Richard Hancock and he’s an expert Illinois gardener. He knows when, where and what to plant. Since Richard was planting, we knew it was time for us to plant our little stockpile of tulip bulbs.

 I spent most of the morning shoveling, rototilling and raking the soil to prepare the flowerbeds for the bulbs. Then Sis. Johnson and I did for ourselves what we’ve been doing for FM these past two weeks, we planted tulip bulbs. The flowerbeds look great but now we will have to wait until April to enjoy the fruits of our labor.

This evening was the long awaited Pumpkin Walk through “Boo-tiful Nauvoo.” The mission had two entries. The first was the float that Sis. Johnson and I helped decorate. It turned out very good and was the very first entry in the whole parade. There were lots of entries in the parade but from what I saw, ours was the only “Float” entered.

The other entry by the mission was a Chinese style dragon carried in the air by a dozen or so Elders and Sister Missionaries. Sis. Van Horn sewed the entire dragon from scratch. She is one of the sisters that is assigned to work in the mission sewing room so she’s a great seamstress.  

The 500 carved Jack-O’-Lanterns lined the main boulevard of Nauvoo and they were one of the highlights of the evening. Each pumpkin was carved with a unique face or image. Some of them were so intricate and detailed they took hours to carve. 

After the parade was over I walked up and down the street for half an hour looking for the three pumpkins that Sis. Johnson carved. Finally, I did find one of them, but I never found the other two.