About Me — Kathryn Andersen Spratt
My bathroom mirror reflects a palimpsest of scars and eyes etched over ancestral legends etched over Mormonism and the Intermountain West.
Acne Scars
The scars are in-spite of, not because of, my family’s grim brushes with poverty. My mother conscientiously shuttled me to dermatologists who peered at my face and shoulders, brushing my skin with dispassionate fingertips. They prescribed endless lists of creams, which I applied, and pills, which I swallowed. I used their recommended soaps and followed their recommended regimens. Still, cystic acne blossomed thickly on my cheeks and jawline, leaving deep pockmarks. I sensed adults’ pity and peers’ morbid fascination. I felt old women’s collective appraisal: She might have been pretty if it weren’t for those pimples.
In my late teens, I applied heavy make-up; then, as a Freshman or Sophomore in college, I embraced bare skin out of laziness. It was my first innocuous violation of a cardinal female commandment, “Thou shalt look pretty at all costs.” When no lighting bolt struck, my impatience with arbitrary social norms and empty traditions simmered into being.
Watchful Eyes
One of my education professors emphasized the importance of teacher “with-it-ness” — the ability to notice and prevent impending mischief. That skill didn’t come naturally for me, but gradually, I developed the capacity to catch the quiet, almost peaceful, destruction of textbooks and bulletin boards. I began to see spilled Cheetos on the floor before someone’s Nikes ground them to dust. And then I started to notice more important things.
Today I noticed a boy crossing his arms to hide a stain on the front of his hoodie; his friend hiding flashes of insight behind feigned boredom; and two girls fanning a fledgling spark of mutual attraction.
Almost a decade ago, I noticed a boy with bad teeth concealing his smile with one hand; a girl admiring her own new snow boots; and a boy grinning slyly at me while whispering, “dammmn.”
In the intervening years, I’ve watched a ceaseless parade of triumphs, heartbreaks, and deceptions. My eyes have become both shrewder and kinder than they once were.
Ancestors
According to one bloody account, my father’s great-grandma used her apron strings to strangle a cougar that threatened her family’s chickens. Her legend is a part of me that prompts fierce tenacity when life calls for it. I imagine her frowning at fickler genetic fragments — another great-great-grandma who went dancing days after giving birth, leaving newborn twins to catch cold; and the biological grandmother who abandoned five children and returned as a transient slip of brittle newsprint, an obituary, which rested lightly on my parents’ dresser.
Mormonism and Mountains
Having lived the majority of my life in Utah, I find its landscape and climate almost indistinguishable from the God depicted in early Mormonism. Both demanded heartbreaking industry, sacrifice, and obedience of Mormon pioneers.
Utah summers are blistering hot; winters are brutally cold. Low humidity renders the lines of rooftops and mountain ranges sharp and clean. The soil is rocky and dry. The first settlers to eke an existence from it must have worked harder than even they had thought possible, and yet, from time to time, it’s harsh subjective beauty must have struck them like a miracle.
On a road trip, I once gazed out the window of a boyfriend’s car at empty sagebrush-covered land and said, “This place is in my blood.” When he laughed uneasily, I launched into an ill-informed lecture on epigenetics. Maybe there was some truth in what I claimed that day; maybe living at the base of the Wasatch Mountains has activated an unbreakable genetic allegiance to intolerant land.
My relationship with Mormonism’s official organization — the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — is more difficult. More complex. Still, like it or not, I will always belong to the mountains.
