"Thanks (to our Parents) for life, for caring, for sacrificing"

I intended to prepare a Father's Day Blog similar to the Mother's Day message posted previously. The amount of information remembered by Maurice and Mary Asay about their father's is limited however owing to the early loss of those gentlemen.

As mentioned previously Mary's father was a big teaser a fact which she did not understand as a young child. On one occasion as she was running around outside the house - along with 2 other children she bumped into her dad who was whittling. She excused herself. Before she could run off again he shook his knife at her and said, "You'd better excuse yourself" She thought he was seriously angry. Probably - if she had looked back before running off she probably would have seen a grin on his face, but since she didn't this incident added to her belief that he was mean. The only time she stood up to him it was in what she felt was defense of her mother. Her father was trimming corns on her mother feet with a pocket knife. To a little girl it looked as if he was hurting her beloved mother. She got angry and told him to stop which he found very amusing.

Thinking now of her father she quotes a recent talk by Elder Richard H. Winkel (Ensign Nov. 2006) "When you come to the temple you will love your family with a deeper love than you have ever felt before."

Maurice's strongest memory of his father is what a hard working man he was. Even during the Depression he always had a job. It might only pay $1.00 a day but he kept busy. He always kept teams of horses and when the Railroad lines were being put in between Frannie and Cane*, WY (*located east of Lovell - toward the Mountains, along the Big Horn River) he and another man ran two teams of horses to assist in the building of the tracks. He worked for a sheep company in the summer transporting groceries to sheep camps in the Mountains from Cane to Thermopolis, WY once a month in two wagons. It was while doing this work that he developed the Rocky Mountain Spotted Tick fever which killed him.

On a personal note I learned early in life that although all of his children were well loved the strongest love was reserved for his eternal companion - his wife. I have a very definite memory of the time I inadvertently made my mother cry and later asked him for help with something. He angrily told me that he didn't feel like doing anything for me since I had made her cry. When I was in college I came across a little plaque that stated: "The most important thing a Father can do for his children is to love their Mother". The next time I was home from school I saw it prominently displayed in the living room, and on several occasion I witnessed him pointing it out to visitors and telling them that that was the rule of the house.