Somewhere I still have a sketch I did at age six on the back of a church bulletin. Frances Cupp sat in the front row, her head bowed from osteoporosis. In blue pen I traced her thin neck where two lengths of thin black ribbon hung down from the corners of a rounded mesh head covering. Covering strings, we called them. The old women at my church whose head coverings had strings were more old-fashioned, more conservative, than my mother’s generation of Mennonite women. When I showed it to my parents they immediately guessed correctly whose likeness it was.
A tiny, spry woman, Frances Cupp dressed in black leather high-top lace-up shoes and dark plain dresses seemingly out of the late 1800s. The oldest member of Erisman Mennonite Church (named for the family who owned the land before the church was built on it). Mrs. Cupp lived in an old stone farmhouse one mile southwest of the church where she and her late husband, Leroy, had made their home together. They did not have children to inherit the farm, so after Leroy died, Frances rented out the land. She unflinchingly picked off nuisance possums with Leroy’s old shotgun, and kept goats in her barn. When I went along with my parents to visit her, Mrs. Cupp showed me the goats and invited us into her kitchen for a visit. She kept most of her nineteenth century farmhouse cold to save money on heating oil. An old woodstove warmed the kitchen. Heavy drapes hung across the doorway of the dining room to keep in the heat. Her dining room table was stacked high with newspapers. She saved everything.
In the late seventies, the years of my earliest childhood memories, the old women of our congregation wore caped dresses, dark stockings and prayer coverings over long, pinned-up hair. The covering was inspired by the letters of the Apostle Paul to the members of the first-century Church living in Corinth: “Any woman praying or prophesying with her head unveiled dishonors her head, as if it were shaven.” By the early 1980s, the younger women at Erisman had begun to cut their hair and some no longer wore the traditional prayer covering. Although my parents were somewhat saddened as Twila and Donna, their oldest daughters, stopped wearing the covering, they did not force the issue.
The Mennonite women of Frances Cupp’s generation each had their own particular way of being, but they held in common a practical knowledge of the changing seasons, a familiar touch for the rough shell of a ripened black walnut, the plucked feather of a pheasant, the velvety neck of a cow. They knew when to tear up their gardens and in what order to plant vegetables. They knew seven ways to preserve fresh produce between each frost and new harvest. They habitually saved meat bones for soup stock and rendered animal fats into jars of lard to bake, make soap or to deep-fry doughnuts and potato chips.
They wasted little, and recycled colorful wool scraps and plastic bread bags which they cut into long strips for making braided rugs like the one on my living room floor. Theirs was a rolled-up-sleeves work ethic that rose early and wore sensible shoes. They dedicated time to manual work and to studying and memorizing Scripture. They had the seemingly natural ability to join in on a given hymn– soprano, alto, or high tenor, whatever was needed to balance the room.
My grandmothers, both of them named Nora, were among these women.
Opening her closet door, my father’s mother, Grandma Nora (Groff) Miller, would choose from a row of homemade cape dresses, all cut from the same pattern and hemmed to mid-calf and with three quarter-length sleeves. Made from matching fabric, the cape was a sleeveless extra bodice layer that fastened at the waistband. A resourceful woman, my grandmother used the space under her loose-fitting cape to store things like cough drops and tissues. Reaching for the tortoise shell hairbrush on her dresser, she would carefully undo her sleep-tousled white braid, and with arthritic hands, exact a straight part down the center of her pink scalp. As she had done her entire adult life, Grandma would wrap a band around the thin shock of hair, and turn the ponytail three times before twining it around her finger and readying it to be fastened to her head with sturdy hairpins. Picking up her “everyday” covering from the dressing table, she would position it carefully on her head, inches back from her widow’s peak, covering her head from crown to nape.
The youngest daughter of five children, Nora Groff tended the family market stand every Friday, talking with their regular cheese customers as she filled their bowls. To prepare for market, Nora helped her family to make three kinds of cheese: Cup cheese, a soft, spreadable cheese; smearcase, (schmierkäsea) strained and seasoned skim milk curds much like cottage cheese; and ball cheese, balls of cottage cheese left to stand until the outside was pale yellow and the inside white. Throughout the week, preparations for Saturday’s market sales included dressing chickens and squabs (little pigeons), harvesting in-season vegetables, gathering eggs, baking sugar cakes, and making walnut and vanilla kisses.
As a young girl, Nora wore large satin bows and the Edwardian-style dresses of non-Mennonite peers. It wasn’t until her baptism and church membership at age fifteen that she put her long dark hair up under a covering and took to the cape dress patterns and heavy black bonnets of other Mennonite women.
While in her early twenties, Grandma would go with her younger brother Elias to attend Sunday evening worship meetings at Mennonite churches throughout Lancaster County. One April Sunday in 1927, when she was twenty-one, Andrew Miller asked Elias to introduce him to his sister. When Elias did, Andrew asked Nora if he might drive her home. She said yes, and soon they were seeing each other every Sunday. My grandmother once told me, “I used to pray about meeting a man, someone humble. If God wanted me to be a home builder, I wanted someone humble.” My grandfather was that man. Everyone I’ve heard talk about Andrew Nissley Miller says the same thing, “I have never heard that man say a critical word about anyone.”
My grandmother took joy in flowers, and cut fresh arrangements for her parent’s parlor table before each of Andrew’s visits. She made cakes and lemonade for their dates, and when the summer heat arrived, they worked together to make homemade ice cream. Not only because it was the 1920’s, but also because they were Mennonites, their courtship did not include eating out at restaurants (a very rare practice for frugal Mennonites of that era, and certainly not one for Sundays), hours on the telephone, or trips to the movies. Instead, they would fill each other in on the events of their week, look at photographs, go to church or visit friends. Evenings with friends usually included singing together around the piano.
When Andrew Miller asked Nora Groff to share life with him, they agreed to pray about it, and began reading scripture, a chapter Sunday evening at Nora’s home and then on their own throughout the week. From the time of their engagement until their marriage, they read through the New Testament from Matthew to Jude.
In September of 1929, one month before the stock market crashed, Andrew bought an eighty-five acre farm in north central Lancaster County, near Manheim. He paid just under $20,000. Nora and Andrew married in November, and typical of Amish and Mennonite farming couples of that time, lived with their parents after their honeymoon before moving onto the farm in spring. To start them out, Nora’s parents provided twenty-five chickens, a cow, and a hog. Nora’s mother canned vegetables and prepared beef roasts for them. She baked the roasts and packed them in large lard-sealed crocks to preserve them. There were no freezers, so they stored the canned beef in their cold cellar. Andrew’s mother also gave them a hog. His father had died from a fall while hanging tobacco, when Andrew was seventeen. Their first winter, they heated the living quarters of the twelve-room farmhouse with a pipeless stove.
About the Great Depression, Grandma Miller said that a lot of rich people lost their money and although she and my grandpa “did not have anything to lose,” “neither could we make.” Milk dropped from 56 cents per pound to 85 cents for 100 pounds. Heavy steers dropped to four cents a pound and heavy hogs to three cents. During the first years, cash crops were hay and tobacco. They had one tractor and kept four work-mules, because Grandpa liked working with them. During haymaking, the mules would pull each wagon load up the barn hill and Grandpa would then hook them to a pulley system that guided a big hay hook. The mules’ strength would raise each hookload up to the loft, where a second person would loosen the sweet sun-dried hay and pile it into the mow.
They ate well, getting meat from their hogs, steers and chickens. They had ten dairy cows, several pigs, and five hundred laying hens. They raised corn and hay-fed steers and sold them for beef or butchered them to supply their own table. Grandma taught each of the children how to pluck and dress chickens. My father, a retired dairy farmer and pastor, can clean a chicken with the best of them. He remembers hearing his mother say that before a girl gets married, she should know how to dress a chicken. They harvested vegetables from their large summer garden of squash, asparagus, carrots, tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, sweet potatoes, sweet corn, beans, peas, and potatoes. They picked white cherries from the tree on their farm, until a heavy rainstorm broke the trunk in half. When they gathered mulberries from the bush in their yard, Grandpa would shake the mulberry bush while Grandma and the children stood underneath it, holding a muslin sheet to catch the berries.
I knew my Grandma Miller as a competent, practical woman. For cheap clothing material, she saved and dyed cloth feed and flour sacks. Even in her daily diary entries, the year she and Grandpa were courting, she didn’t write about her inner thoughts and feelings, but rather kept a log of work accomplished.
Friday. This morning we boiled red beets, baked raisin pies, and cleaned mother’s room and the bathroom. Mowed the yard this evening.
Saturday. Papa and I on market, eggs sold at 27 and 30 cents a dozen.
Beyond the diary, the extent of her writing was recipes, sermon notes, and the lists she kept. She had a list of the 100 guests who attended their wedding in her parents’ home, what they ate for the wedding dinner–meat loaf, sweet potatoes, and jumbo fried oysters–and their gifts–seventeen tablecloths, silverware, pretty dinner dishes, six quilts and five comforters. When company dropped by to visit, she made a note of it in the guestbook she kept on the coffee table in the living room.
I admire the physical work of my grandmothers’ generation. My professional work involves a lot of time staring at the computer and has become something I do with my mind and my typing fingers. As I shuffle to the waiting coffee pot, it occurs to me that neither of my grandmothers woke up this way. Grandma Miller used to quote her mother, Susan Herr, “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” She perhaps forgot to mention it was Benjamin Franklin who originally said it. After she was married, Grandma Miller’s day began at five o’clock in the morning when they brought in corncobs to kindle a fire in the wood burning stove. By the time Grandpa and the hired man came in for breakfast at 6:30, Grandma had prepared oatmeal and eggs for them. On canning days, she would cold pack fruit or vegetables into the jars and set them inside of the large iron kettle to boil them. For laundry, she used the same kettle to heat water, a ringer washer, and her soap made of lard and lye. When the weather was too bad to hang laundry outdoors, she would move the drying rack in front of the stove.
Until the children were old enough to help, Grandpa had a hired man, and Grandma helped with the milking. While she was out milking, she would tie the kitchen chairs to the table legs so the children couldn’t use them to climb up to the cupboards and get into things.
If Grandpa and the boys were out picking tomatoes or husking corn, someone would tug on the rope that rang the bell on the roof. If the noisy tractor engine was running, Grandma or one of the younger children would stand by the field’s edge and wave a handkerchief. They would wave back and finish their last morning round, coming soon through the kitchen door to wash up and sit down to a large noon meal. Afternoons allowed for a brief rest before the small herd of cows was full of milk and hungry again at four o’clock, and before gathering the eggs.
When confronted with bookstore shelves lined with theories of early childhood development and how to raise children, I think of my grandmothers and my mother. What they knew about raising children came from watching their own mothers and talking with other women in their community. They allowed their small children to work beside them, but also made lots of room for imaginary play.
My father’s parents didn’t have store-bought toys for their children, but a family friend made them a wooden train set, a dog pull-toy, a marble roller, and little chairs. Andrew covered a low table with linoleum where the children could play with home-made modeling clay Nora would make from flour and salt. When a one-room schoolhouse shut its doors, Grandpa bought their old blackboard and installed it in the children’s playroom wall. Decades later, my sisters and I would use it to play school. Washing that black board and clapping the erasers became one of my Saturday morning chores.
Grandma once told me that when my Dad (Andrew Miller Jr.) played church with his siblings, he would preach “very emphatically” one of his favorite sermons, “I am the Vine and Ye are the branches.” They would all sit on the stair steps for a traditional indoor service, or throw blankets over the wash line to mimic the tent revival meetings of their day, taking turns as song leader. Growing up in the same house where our father did, my sisters and I sat on those same steps to play church, shushing our baby dolls and taking turns preaching.
Singing together was part of both of my parents’ families.
My mother’s mother, Nora (Pfautz) Siegrist, said she would often hear her children singing long after she had put them to bed, their little voices blending in the hymns they knew. When Mary Ann, the youngest, ran out of words, she would call out from her crib to her brother, “Raymond, help me!” Grandma’s eyes would twinkle to tell it.
Nora Pfautz spent her childhood on a farm in northern Lancaster County, and was in her teens when she moved with her parents and four siblings to a townhouse in Ephrata. Her mother, Mary Ann (Stoner) Pfautz, died when Nora was fifteen, and her father, Jacob Pfautz, died two years later. The oldest of Grandma’s two sisters, Anna, worked as a seamstress in a local dress factory and Nora and her other sister Barbara made cakes and lard-fried potato chips to sell. My grandma couldn’t talk about those chips without craving them. “Oh, do I get a taste for those chips still,” she would say. The Pfautz sisters drove an old truck over the inherited peddling route their parents had begun with horse and wagon. Grandma hated peddling. “Knocking on doors made me feel like a beggar,” she once told me.
At her father’s urging, Nora had continued high school after her mother’s death. She learned typing and shorthand, loved reading, but disliked math. When she started dating John Henry Siegrist, she was working in the office at Meylin’s, a local Dairy. One Saturday date night, with Henry outside waiting for her, a late-returning delivery truck driver checked in with a sack full of pennies he’d gotten from the bank just to tease her. A tall, dark-haired beauty, Nora was not amused by his antics. “Well, I didn’t get all of those pennies counted. I just put the whole thing in the safe and told my boss about it!” She told the story with a look of dismissive annoyance.
Henry and Nora married in November, 1937, at Nora’s home. Moments before my grandmother walked down the steps in her white dress, she leaned against the bathroom sink for one final check in the mirror and got a big water spot on her dress. My great aunt Barbara, who was in the room as Grandma told me this story, chimed in sagely, “Nobody was interested in a spot on your dress. They were interested in who was coming down the steps!”
Like my dad’s parents, Henry and Nora also married in November and did not move onto their farm until spring. Their farm was on Pleasant View Road in the PennRynn hills of Manheim. As the former owner ushered the young couple in to look around the farmhouse, a litter of puppies had tottered out from behind the wood stove. A very particular housekeeper who believed that animals belonged outside, Grandma did not approve. As they walked throughout the house, they noted its disrepair, peeling wallpaper, and chipping paint– ironic, considering that the owner was a painter and paperhanger by trade.But they decided to buy the place anyway, and with help from Henry’s parents and their sisters, “fixed it up, inch by inch”.
Nora and Henry’s firstborn child was Naomi, my mother. During Naomi’s afternoon naps, Nora worked ground out in the field, something she enjoyed very much. Before she put my mother to bed, she showed her the field where she would be. When my mother would wake from her afternoon naps she would come down the stairs to find a glass of milk and a snack on the bottom step. She would then emerge from the house and call out for her mother, who would wave or holler back from the tractor. Then, clutching her dolly in a chubby embrace, my mother would sit on the rickety porch and wait.
In a 1942 photograph on my dresser Grandma and Grandpa Siegrist are sitting on that porch, their two little girls between them. Round-faced Naomi is about three, suntanned and pudgy, next to her pale baby sister Lois. Grandpa is wearing work boots and bib-overalls and Grandma one of her calico pinafore aprons, her dark hair pinned up under an organdy prayer covering.
From the time she was baptized at age twelve to the end of her life, Grandma Siegrist put away her childhood hair bows and began to dress plain. Every day she put on her covering. In turn, she took her three daughters shopping for their own prayer coverings. At twelve, my mother was the first of Nora’s daughters to be baptized into the Mennonite Church. My mom remembers her mother taking her on her first covering-shopping excursion. They went to Hagar’s Department Store in downtown Lancaster. This was the 1950’s, when the main department store in downtown Lancaster still had a plain clothing section for Mennonite customers.
In the black leather-bound Bible that my father gifted to her, my mother has highlighted in red pencil the verse from I Corinthians that says, “Long hair is a woman’s glory and is given to her as a covering.” The Mennonite head covering was one part of the overall practice of modesty.
As a child, I would watch my mother pulling her long dark hair back into an inverted black barrette at the nape of her neck, expertly flipping it up before securing it with a second barrette and then using hairpins to lay it flat. She kept the hairpins pressed between her lips as she went.
This was all normal to me. I did not grow up thinking, “My mother wears a little white hat.” I simply knew that if my mother got into the car without her covering, it was worth the effort to tell her before we drove away, or she’d have to turn the car around. On long car trips, my mother used to prepare to put her head back for a nap by taking off her covering and pinning it to the ceiling of the car. Growing up, the sight of a prayer covering, or, as some outsiders called them, “little white hats,” “cheese strainers,” “helmets,” or “coffee filters,” was as familiar a sight to me as any. The women who wore them were not spectacle. They were my grandmothers, mother, school teachers, church friends and neighbors.
My kindergarten teacher, Miss Wren, wore her straight brown hair parted down the middle and pulled back in a barrette. I remember her covering being round and resting closer to her head than my mother’s. Miss Meyers, my first grade teacher, wore what we called a veil. It was a soft white scarf pinned to her red honey hair. It fluttered against her neck as she erased the chalkboard. I knew the veil meant she belonged to a different Anabaptist group, the River Brethren. My parents were Lancaster Conference Mennonite.
In 1976, the year I was born, Lancaster Mennonite High stopped requiring female students to wear coverings. By that time, most girls only wore them during the school day, stashing them in their lockers at last bell. My freshman year of high school, fourteen years later, they finally changed the dress code for girls to allow pants. My older sisters remember being told (by the school and by our parents) they could wear pants only if they wore skirts over them. This rule was a source of great protestations in our home. But by the time I was old enough to really even care, the no-pants rule was retired.
When my sisters were baptized, Hagar’s Department Store had long ago stopped offering a plain clothing section. Like other Mennonites in our area, my older sisters went with Mom to Marian and Ruth’s Dress Shop in Mount Joy to pick out their first prayer covering. The Musser sisters, Ruth and Marian, sewed custom-made dresses, mostly in the plain dress patterns of conservative Anabaptist groups.
When my family watches old slides together, there is one that always draws a comment from my oldest sister Twila. Squinty-eyed, pink infant me is held in her arms. She is twelve, the year after her baptism. Her long brown hair drapes over her shoulder, and a large covering perches awkwardly on her head. Twila always tells us this giant covering was not hers. It was Mom’s. Twila had just washed her hair and hadn’t bothered to run upstairs to get her own covering for the photo.
Born in the early sixties, Twila and her church friends were part of the generation that moved outside of plain dress. They sewed some of their clothing, but also shopped at regular department stores and wore skirts that came above the knee. Before ultimately forfeiting the head covering and adapting to join their high school peers, they sometimes referred jokingly to their coverings as their “lid”. By this time, their coverings were not at all bonnet-shaped, like those of our grandmothers, but flat, like my kindergarten teacher’s.
The covering store I remember was a scaled-back reshuffling of the original Marian and Ruth’s. One of the sisters had died, and the other moved the business onto her brother’s farmhouse, two miles up the road from us. I went there once or twice with my mom, whose own covering choices had continued to shrink. Next to a greenhouse, in a long room with fluorescent lights, there were dresser drawers full of zippers, buttons, and trim lace. Displayed in stacks on laminated tabletops in the back, I examined white organdy Amish bonnets, conservative Mennonite bonnets with strings, slightly smaller Mennonite head coverings without strings, and even smaller coverings like the one my mother wore at the time. They sold flat lace coverings, too. These mantillas, or doilies, in either black or white, were the last iteration of the prayer covering. Eventually, my mother would exchange her mesh covering for a flat circle of lace. First white, then black and less noticeable.
I never adopted the practice. When I was eleven and preparing for my own baptism, the Snyders, a married couple in their late forties, visited my Sunday school class to talk to us about the Biblical origins of the head covering. I remember Mrs. Snyder’ spoke’s earnestness and sincerity. She read to us from the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Corinthian Christians. I studied her wavy red hair, pinned close beneath her covering. She was concerned about Mennonites giving up this conviction and practice.
Taking a quick survey of the room, I recognized that of the eight in my Sunday school class, I was one of only three whose mothers still wore any kind of prayer covering, and my mother was the only one who still wore her hair long and pinned up. We were likely the end of the line for the covering among Erisman women. Later that year, three of my girlfriends and I were the first group of Erisman Church girls to be baptized and never wear the head covering. If you want to be technical, you could count Shelby’s white lace mantilla, worn just for the baptism. I never saw her wear it again.
My baptism came on the heels of the time when my older sisters and their friends at church had tucked their coverings away in the backs of dresser drawers.
Our mothers had questions of their own. How much should they encourage their daughters to wear the covering? Some of them began to question their own practice– if it really was still out of conviction, that it still represented, for them, an attitude of reverence? If so, then why would they accept their daughters’ decision without much protest? Or, was it out of reluctance to break with tradition and risk loss of such a key identity marker? Or did they wear it because they didn’t want to offend (or be judged by) other more conservative Mennonites living around them? Were any one of those reasons reason enough?
When it was my week to dust the upstairs furniture, I would remove everything from my parents’ dresser top and line it on a towel across their bed: Dad’s Old Spice aftershave, Mom’s Avon powder, a hair net, hairpins, a mirror, a comb and brush set, a wooden keepsakes box, and her three prayer coverings, with straight pins jabbed through them. Standing before my parents’ dresser mirror, I would practice putting up my hair with my mother’s hairpins and hair net before trying on one of her coverings, pinning it on securely with straight pins like I’d seen my mother do countless times. I would hold the pins between my pinched lips the way she did (and told us not to do).
Like me, my plain cousins made a confession of Christian faith around age twelve or thirteen and were baptized as members of their very conservative Mennonite congregations (Eastern Pennsylvania Mennonite). As the girls stopped wearing their hair in long braids and piled it up under large prayer coverings, I cut mine and curled my bangs. As they began to appear like their mothers and sew their own dresses as their grandmothers had done, I spent each morning before school rummaging for an outfit that didn’t make me feel fat. Although I didn’t want to live their lives, I was aware that my cousins were passing through their teens with an air of grace and acceptable femininity I simply lacked. They seemed to have a dignified composure about them while I rarely felt at home in my own skin. By the time I was tromping through junior high with baggy tee shirts and crispy bangs held up by Rave #3 hair spray, all but one of my grade school teachers (the private school I attended had Mennonite and Brethren roots), had stopped wearing head coverings of any kind. My mother remained one of the very few among the mothers of my peers who still wears her hair up in a covering, the traditional way. As a middle school student, this sometimes made me feel self conscious.
As I moved along through high school, studying Spanish, geometry, and Shakespeare, my cousins completed the tenth grade and stopped their schooling. While my teachers had masters degrees, my cousins were taught by men and women from their own sect with no higher education. My cousins were married and raising multiple children while I studied at a liberal arts college outside of Philadelphia. I developed intense interest in sociology, philosophy, world history, anthropology, community development, and women’s studies. I wrote letters to my Grandma Siegrist from a dorm room in Cairo, Egypt.
When visiting with my plain relatives, topics like college courses, books I’d read, movies I’d seen, were all off-limits. Without question, my involvement in theater all throughout high school and college remained a detail I kept quiet. I certainly didn’t feel free to invite my cousins to any of my plays. My pursuits would to them seem frivolous and worldly, selfish even. They were working to support their family greenhouse businesses. I was traveling, writing and reading in pursuit of no practical goal.
Once, during my junior year, I invited my mother to spend the day with me at college. She took the train from Lancaster and accompanied me to each class. I gave her some of my course texts to read, and introduced her to professors and friends. We spent the evening in my dorm room sitting on my bed and talking. We sang some favorite hymns out of a hymnal I kept in my room, trading between alto and soprano.
It was really good having her there, and it wasn’t until after she had caught the train back home that I began to rehearse a moment that had taken place in the stairwell of the main classroom building. I kept returning to it in my mind, seeing my mother stooped down to clean some distracted student’s coffee spill off the landing. I had noticed the spill too, and the student who had kept on walking without seeming to notice. I chose to ignore it. But my mother, in a matter of seconds, had located a crumpled tissue in her purse and leaned down to mop it up. I had started to say something like, “You don’t have to do that.” But had stopped myself.
Watching my mother bend down to clean some careless stranger’s mess, I’d felt a little guilty, wishing I had done it instead. I had let myself be distracted by the symbolism. Freshly awash in texts on the abjection of women over the centuries, I easily felt anger over the ways society still makes its women responsible for messes not our own. In my determination to set boundaries that affirmed my dignity, I had chosen apathy. Unencumbered by overthinking, my mother had simply acted from common sense. “Why? If this mess doesn’t get wiped up now, someone track it up the stairs, making it harder for the cleaning staff to manage.” Of course she didn’t stop to ask whose responsibility it was. She just did it, same as my grandmothers would have done.
Every time I look back on the moment in the stairwell I am grateful for what it showed me. We can become so hyper aware of power dynamics that our action (or inaction) becomes dizzyingly self-referential and silly. It reminds me of the time when, standing in line at a grocery store that employs mostly plain Mennonites, a child in front of me dropped a soda can and it exploded all over the floor. Seemingly within seconds, two young women, both in head coverings and cape dresses, descended on the sticky puddle with cleaning rags. Soon, a third woman joined them with a bucket. The deft speed with which they lowered themselves to take care of someone else’s mess is a hallmark of those who surrounded me throughout my youth. A proactive, quick to respond, practical attitude of service is something I saw in these Mennonite men and women.
I grew up watching my mother nurture people and plants. She doubles and triples recipes so there will be leftovers to share. When her children visit, she loads us up with bags of food. She stubbornly refuses payment. “It was on sale,” she’ll say. When my parents first visited my husband and me in Philadelphia, we took a walk around the neighborhood. Stopping by our steps, my mother saw weeds growing up through the cracks in the cement and began pulling them. “These pull out so easy after the rain!” She said jubilantly, yanking them up emphatically by the roots. While she worked, she described how when she and my father had first moved onto the farm, her mother-in-law would do the same thing. “It will ruin the cement,” Grandma Miller would say, making her feel inadequate. Watching my mother attack the weeds I had ignored, I felt no sense of personal failure. This moment, like the one in the stairwell, added to my affection, my gratitude to her for being so much the person she is. She then proceeded to water my hanging plants.
Recently, I took chicken green bean casserole to a friend who had just had her third child. I got the recipe from a cookbook that the women of Erisman had put together. As I prepared the food, I realized Esther Wenger had provided the recipe. According to my mother’s diary, Esther Wenger brought a casserole to my family a few days after I was born, as my mother did for many families, over the years. This connection comforts me.
My mother learned from her mother how to garden and can. She went to 4-H and learned to sew. I am remedial, at best, in all three departments. These things are not passed down as naturally as you might think. She offered to teach me how to sew, but I easily became impatient. I was also that child who hated standing still while my mother hemmed the skirt she was making for me. I had such little patience as she held up pinned-together bodices to my chin and draped sleeve patterns over my arms. It didn’t help that I thought I had a round tummy and felt self conscious in every skirt or dress I wore. I took this out on my mother, too. When she asked me to turn while she used a hemmer to mark fabric hem with chalk and straight pins, I grew restless. I disliked the crinkly feel of the pattern paper and cold metal hemming ruler against the backs of my legs. I was always happy to bolt when she sighed and said, “Okay fine. I guess that’s good enough.”
Last fall as I prepared to can just a few jars of salsa in my Philadelphia apartment, using peppers and tomatoes I’d grown in a small raised garden bed in the burned out lot across the street, I telephoned my mother in Manheim for a refresher course on canning techniques. Her voice coming through the phone, “If you are hot-packing, you’ll want to warm the jars beforehand. I put them in the oven first at about 200 degrees. Be sure to wipe the rim with a damp cloth.” As I listened, I was keenly aware of her mortality, and my own.
Paging through my Grandma Miller’s tattered copy of the Mennonite Community Cookbook, I find recipes for walnut kisses and sugar cookies, along with recipes she’d copied and taped on pieces of lined note paper. In her shaky, arthritic hand, I read: Chicken Stoltzfus, doughnuts, peppernuts, and baked apples. Other recipes, copied in her younger, smoother hand, are scrawled in the margins of the index: Date and nut pudding, old-fashioned molasses cookies, Lillie Mae molasses cookies, and molasses crinkles.
The thought of Grandma Miller’s molasses cookies takes me back to the early 1980s when I would ride my bike or walk out the lane to visit Grandma and Grandpa. One Halloween night, our parents, who do not celebrate Halloween, made an exception. They let me and my sisters dress up in grey wigs from out dress-up box. We used Twila’s eyebrow pencil to draw creases on our foreheads and wore housecoats to go to see them. Opening the door, Grandma burst into a laugh, “Oh my, oh!” She said, turning to call to Grandpa over her shoulder, “Papa, come and see this!” Moving back from the door, she motioned us in with her broad arm and went to the ceramic apple-shaped cookie jar. Removing the ceramic stem, she produced four large molasses cookies.
Sometimes I would keep Grandma company while Grandpa (now retired from dairy farming) was working at a florist business, Malmborg’s Greenhouse. Malmborg was a horticulturalist and first-generation Swedish immigrant. I would help as I could. Sometimes I would dust the furniture, make trips up and down the basement stairs to fetch jars so that she would not have to, or thread her sewing needle. She kept a drying rack for making apple schnitz and would let me place the apples on the sheets as she sliced them. For Grandpa’s work clothes, she still used a ringer washer, which she kept in the garage. I found that process fascinating. Sometimes she would let me scrub or turn the ringer. The bars of homemade lard soap felt extra slippery.
In the evenings, when Grandpa was there, I would ask to bring out a game from the hallway shelf and we would all three sit together at the table to play a game of Take-One with red Anagrams tiles. Sweet meadow tea sweating at my elbow, I would swing my feet toward the center leg of their kitchen table, the metal chilling my bare toes. We moved the plastic tiles across the cool Formica laminate tabletop, pink and silver squiggles against a white background. Above the kitchen cabinets I could read the calligraphy that Erma Wenger, an artist friend from Erisman had painted, “In everything give thanks.” On the other side of the sink Erma had painted “I owe the Lord a morning song…” The complete line from that hymn says, “I owe the Lord a morning song / of gratitude and praise / for the kind mercies He has shown / in lengthening out my days.” The writer of that hymn, Amos Herr, was an ancestor of Susan Herr, Grandma Miller’s mother.
When I wasn’t in school yet, Grandma Miller took me with her to sewing circle at church. Carrying my plastic teddy bears’ picnic basket filled with peanut butter fluff cracker sandwiches prepared by my mother and Grandma’s dried apple schnitz, I would walk with her into the church basement. Her broad hand with its soft palm felt warm. It reminded me of my Dad’s hands. The other Erisman women who showed up faithfully to make patchwork quilts and comforters “for the needy” always welcomed me affectionately. They didn’t mind when I would crawl underneath the quilt frame and watch as the tips of the quilting needles would appear, guided by the thimbled thumbs waiting beneath to grab and pull them taut before pushing them up through again. From the four sides of the quilt frame, a chorus of black orthopedic shoes pointed in toward me as I sat cross-legged on the floor, eating Grandma’s apple schnitz.
As change erodes tradition, there are some casualties that evoke more of a sense of loss in me than others. It does not bother me that the physical head covering is disappearing. What does bother me is the disappearing humility of memory, and the forgetfulness of a way of being in the world that seeks to imitate the way of Jesus the humble servant.
Frances Cupp died at home, in the house where she lived out most of her years. The next generation of Erisman women, whom I never thought of as old, who surrounded my life growing up, are dying. Frieda Yoder, with her joyful smile, Ruth White, who I’d chat with at her flower stand in Lancaster’s Central Market, Mildred Bucher, in a wheelchair for the last years of her life, who, when my family visited her over Christmas, took time to show my niece old photographs. We’ve lost Thelma Longenecker, with her kind face and gentle southern lilt that she picked up in Georgia from her years of voluntary service through the Mennonite Church. Single all her life, Thelma carried a radiance about her. She would send carefully typed notes of encouragement and birthday cards to people. She had a wonderful laugh, and took an interest in young people, mentoring my older sister Julia, and offering to host youth group Bible Studies in her home. I remember her home, dusting and cleaning for her, and mowing her lawn, jobs for which she paid me with a type-written check. Above Thelma’s kitchen cupboards Erma Wenger had painted in calligraphy, “In Everything Give Thanks.” Just as it had been in Grandma Miller’s kitchen.
Both my grandmothers have gone from this world. I wonder what part of them has become part of me. The head coverings they set on their dressers each night are now packed away in boxes in an attic somewhere. These bits of fabric are tangible reminders of the prayers these women prayed over us, their daughters and sons, their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren, each night and each new day. I was fourteen when Grandma Miller died. A widow for five years, she died in a Mennonite nursing home just north of Lancaster city, across from an enormous shopping mall built over farmland. Grandma Siegrist died fourteen years later.
On my kitchen shelf there is a can of Nora Siegrist’s stuffed peppers. I know she would not have been pleased to know that they have gone uneaten all this time. But I haven’t brought myself to open it– her work, there on the shelf, preserved in vinegar.
The spring before my Grandma Siegrist died, I visited her in the hospital, and she let me rub lotion on her feet. I remember the weight of her feet and the feel of her flesh against my fingertips, how tangible she was then, alive. I could feel her wanting to go, to be let go, something she had wanted ever since Grandpa died.
Home from the hospital that last time, Grandma Siegrist moved into the Grossma house, a small apartment that her son Raymond and his wife Ginny had built onto the home farm they had lived in since the early 1970’s.
With help from the family, Raymond and Ginny made it possible for Grandma to live her last days in the home where she and Grandpa had lived for over thirty years, where they had laughed together and teased each other, brought up seven children, and grieved the death of their eighth child, Twila, who didn’t make it past four days old. They were partners, working together in planting and in harvest. After Grandma died, we found a poem she had written for Grandpa after his unexpected death twelve years earlier.
In the spring,
In greenhouse planting.
I can sense you
There beside me
Even though I cannot see you…
The last time I sat with Grandma Siegrist, she drifted in and out of sleep. I read aloud to her from the Psalms of David, trying awkwardly to hold the straw to her lips for the juice that Aunt Ginny had set on the nightstand. Most of the time, I just held her hand, my own thick fingers entwined with her papery, near-translucent, skin. I heard visitors from Grandma’s church entering the house through the kitchen, and felt it was time for me to go. Leaning close to my grandmother’s face, even though her eyes were half-closed in rest, I said, “Grandma, I’m leaving now. I love you.” Her blue eyes fluttered open, and her pupils shrank as she focused on my face. Her voice low and husky, each syllable accented by the effort it took for her to speak, she said, before letting her eyelids fall shut again, “I. Love. You. Too.”
I fled the house through the back screen door.Without saying good-bye to Aunt Ginny or Uncle Raymond, I crossed the side yard to the barn where I had parked under a weeping willow tree. As I pulled out onto the quiet road, the sun was setting over the pond where Grandma used to skate with my mother, her strong farmer’s hand gripping the chubby hand of her dark-eyed little girl.
from my series of 3 essays about place, home, and family: Gone from Here ©2008
Step closer. 