rachel@home

Utah

When we were driving through Utah, it took a good hundred miles or so before I became aware of the symbol on the highway signs and started wondering what it was. Before that, I had been sort of idly thinking it was boxer shorts, or swim trunks, but, once I applied a little bit of reasoning to that, it was pretty obvious that no self-respecting state was going to put boxer shorts up on their state highway signs.

So I looked a little more closely at it, and my second best guess was that it was an igloo, which really, made even less sense than boxer shorts. Then I asked Abby what she thought it was, and we went back and forth and she finally said it looked like a beehive. I couldn't see what on earth Utah had to do with beehives, so I remained unconvinced. Eventually, we made sure we took pictures of it and then we promptly forgot about it as we moved onto states with less cryptic highway signs.

Last week, the girls stayed with grandma and grandpa, and they got stuff to make scrapbooks of their trip, and one thing Abby got was stickers of all the states, and she very cutely decorated her scrapbook cover with a trail of all the stickers of all the states we'd been to. I was admiring it this weekend, and flipped out when I saw that the sticker of Utah had much more recognizable beehive on it, with little bees buzzing all around it.

I explained the backstory to my mom, who said, well, yes, Utah was the beehive state. This is a little bit of apparently common knowledge that I failed to obtain in the last 30-plus years.

So with a little bit of research, I discover that not only is its state nickname 'the beehive state' but that it's also got a beehive right on its flag! The things I never knew I never knew.