We have a winner! The winner of Valerie Weaver-Zercher’s Thrill of the Chaste: The Allure of Amish Romance Novels is . . .
Gwen Witmer
Congratulations, Gwen – happy reading!
The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth by Jennie A. Brownscombe (1914) Courtesy Wikipedia
PRAYER
A holiday celebrated primarily in the United States and Canada, Thanksgiving invites us to pause and give thanks as we pray, that mysterious communication between one’s heart and the mind of God. Writer C. S. Lewis declares his attitude before prayer: “The prayer preceding all prayers is “May it be the real I who speaks.” British author W. H. Auden expresses the mystery of prayer in a haiku: “He has never seen God, / but once or twice, he believes / he has heard Him,” quoted in The New Yorker, November 14, 2011. And the British author John Baillie implores of God as he prays:
Let me use disappointment as material for patience.
Let me use success as material for thankfulness.
Let me use trouble as material for perseverance.
Let me use danger as material for courage.
Let me use reproach as material for long-suffering.
Let me use praise as material for humility.
Let me use pleasures as material for temperance.
Let me use pain as material for endurance.
Children in our church’s 2-year-old class learn that prayer is talking to God, and then they do just that when they clasp their fat, little fingers as they sing “God is great, and God is good” before snack time:
“Keeping company with God” is the title of Part One of Philip Yancey’s book with the arresting title Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference? He discusses also the language of prayer and the dilemmas of prayer including what one should pray for, the enigma of unanswered prayer, and “un-prayed answers.” (220) Ah, the mystery of talking to God.
PRAISE
Lately I decided to cheer myself up by reviewing the bounty of God’s blessings. When the machinery of life goes awry–the doctor has a dire report, the car breaks down, a friend misunderstands–how can it be that I overlook divine intervention? My memory for blessing is so limited, and so I record evidences of God’s faithfulness:
PETITION
Over the years, in fact since 1984, I have accumulated prayer cards, some printed with typewriter ribbon and later ones two-sided and computer generated. Most of what is on the card are names of family and friends who need help, but sometimes there is a condition humanly unsolvable that I pray God will remedy. The cards are speckled with dates recording what I regard as answers to prayer.
How soon we forget. How necessary to remember!
Denise Levertov, from Sands of the Well, expresses with clarity the “quiet mystery” of communication between God and [wo]man in two stanzas of “Primary Wonder” (vimeo):
Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing
their colored clothes; cap and bells.
And then
once more the quiet mystery is present to me, the throng’s clamor recedes; the mystery that there is anything, anything at all, let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything, rather than void: and that, O Lord, Creator, Hallowed One, you still,
hour by hour sustain it.
How do you practice gratitude?
During this Thanksgiving season do you have a story, long treasured in the family or a newly minted one to share? We’re ready to listen!
Facebook asks boldly, “Do you want to post this on your wall?” meaning do you want this information available to your Facebook friends? Obviously, walls in the 1950s were not electronic. The only walls we knew then were made of plaster. But more on that later!
Longenecker Homestead in the family for five generations
The John Longenecker homestead sits just across the road from Bossler Mennonite Church. The scene is bucolic, farms and land extending as far as the eye can see in this quiet niche of western Lancaster County. Poles that once attached electrical wiring to this house are gone, so I assume a plainer family, probably Amish, now lives in the house and farms the acreage.
Apparently the family is not bashful about proclaiming their convictions, broadcasting from their mailbox on both sides two biblical admonitions, one from John 8:11, words of Jesus to the Samaritan woman.
Usually painted scenes and pretty art adorn the walls of modern homes, but “back in the day” wall hangings we called mottoes were intended to exhort and encourage. Above the door leading from my Grandma’s kitchen to the sitting room is this stern commandment:
Upstairs in Grandma’s Victorian-style bedroom is a poem with a much softer touch, embroidered for her mother by my aunt, Ruth Longenecker:
My Mother’s Garden, an embroidered poem by author Alice E. Allen
In our own home was this fixture from Proverbs 3:6 in the little walkway between our living and dining rooms. There it was from childhood to adulthood imprinting our minds and hearts until it eventually became invisible to us.
The wall hanging that made the biggest impression on me was Rudyard Kipling’s “If, for Men” adapted into an the idealized version for women or girls. I never tried to memorize the whole poem, but the words “If you can hear the whispering about you . . . ” keep chiming in my mind even now:
IF – for Girls
If you can hear the whispering about you
And never yield to deal in whispers, too;
If you can bravely smile when loved ones doubt you
And never doubt, in turn, what loved ones do;
If you can keep a sweet and gentle spirit
In spite of fame or fortune, rank or place,
And though you win your goal or only near it,
Can win with poise or lose with equal grace;
If you can meet with Unbelief, believing,
And hallow in your heart, a simple creed,
If you can meet Deception, undeceiving,
And learn to look to God for all you need;
If you can be what girls should be to mothers:
Chums in joy and comrades in distress,
And be unto others as you’d have the others
Be unto you – – no more, and yet no less;
If you can keep within your heart the power
To say that firm, unconquerable “No,”
If you can brave a present shadowed hour
Rather than yield to build a future woe;
If you can love, yet not let loving master,
But keep yourself within your own self’s clasp,
And not let Dreaming lead you to disaster
Nor Pity’s fascination loose your grasp;
If you can lock your heart on confidences
Nor ever needlessly in turn confide;
If you can put behind you all pretenses
Of mock humility or foolish pride;
If you can keep the simple, homely virtue
Of walking right with God – – then have no fear
That anything in all the world can hurt you – –
And – – which is more – – you’ll be a Woman, dear.
by Elizabeth Lincoln Otis
We want to know. What was/is hanging on the walls of your home, past or present?
By the way, it’s not too late to enter the book giveaway contest for a chance to win a copy of Valerie Weaver-Zercher’s book The Thrill of the Chaste: The Allure of Amish Romance Novels.
Click HERE to post a comment and a chance to win. The contest closes on Saturday, November 9, 2013 at noon. Only comments logged into this website can be honored. The winner will be announced here on this blog and in an email.
“Going Home, going home, I’m just going home . . . .” William Arms Fisher wrote a spiritual tune with nostalgic lyrics adapted from the famous largo in Dvorak’s 9th Symphony that hints of going home “through an open door.”
Last Saturday I walked through the open door back home to my college reunion during Homecoming weekend at Eastern Mennonite University. Nestled among the purple mountains of Virginia in the lush Shenandoah Valley, EMU‘s banner proclaims itself “A Chritian University Like No Other.”
EMU was just a college when I attended. Now the campus seems twice as large and current students way younger than I remember. I kept having to adjust to the sensation of flipping between decades as I viewed the campus and my classmates in a time warp.
There were other adjustments too. College girls now were sporting blue jeans and serious jewelry; my female classmates, like me, all wore braids or buns with prayer coverings.
Our class gift was the donation of the campus’ first piano. Now there was a magnificent pipe organ in the sanctuary, string ensembles playing folksy tunes, and (gasp!) a theatre department.
“Scatter seeds of loving deeds . . . till we are gathered home at last.” Walking Roots Band
Old Friends
My college room-mate Verna Mohler Colliver and meOther room-mates and friends: Our name tags imprinted with college yearbook photos.Raymond Martin, motorcycle ridin’ class-mate
Yes, we have all changed. The institution has changed too, outwardly at least, but the mission of the university has remained the same: commitment to rigorous academics with an invitation “to follow Christ’s call, to bear witness to faith, serve with compassion, and walk boldly in the way of nonviolence and peace” in true Anabaptist Mennonite tradition. The motto that was displayed front and center in the sanctuary of the chapel when I was a student still remains: Thy Word is Truth John 17:17.
New Friend
Shirley Hershey Showalter and I have been getting acquainted in the blog world by visiting each other’s websites since March 2013. In September of this year her memoir, Blush: A Mennonite Girl Meets and Glittering Worldwas published and she has been on a whirlwind book tour, yet she made time for us to meet and visit over breakfast at her home in Harrisonburg, VA on the edge of the EMU campus.
Her breakfast room and office space overlook the gorgeous Massanutten Mountains. The office space includes what you would expect from a college English professor, turned college president and now author–tons of books and orderly files. However, I discovered that there is a special chair where she weaves the magic: a red upholstered swivel chair facing the mountain view. No wonder her book sings!
magic chair
“I promise: you will be transported,” says Bill Moyers of her memoir. Part Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, part Growing Up Amish, and part Little House on the Prairie, this book evokes a lost time in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, when a sheltered little girl with big dreams entered a family and church caught up in the midst of the cultural changes of the 1950s and `60s.
Carolyn Stoner, winner of BLUSH book giveaway contest
Carolyn reports that she loves, loves, loves the book and has underlined certain passages and even inserted little pink sticky notes to earmark special pages. (Stickies concealed for photo!) Carolyn’s name was chosen in a drawing by commenting on my review of Shirley new book: Book review and Contest
My mom’s sacred space is her kitchen where she offers the sacrifice of her heart and hands to those in need and indeed her family. On my last trip to Pennsylvania, Mother made chicken corn soup from a recipe in her head. When I ask her how much of this or that, her quick reply is always, “Just how you think.” I don’t know what to think, so I always try to extract some measurements out of her. Her current “guess” for our favorite harvest soup:
Mother Longenecker’s Chicken Corn Soup
Cook 5-6 pieces of chicken, breasts or thighs. Set aside.
In broth from cooked chicken, add 1 ½ – 2 pints of corn, fresh or frozen.
Dice 4 hard-boiled eggs.
Now, add chicken breasts, chopped up
Season with salt & pepper to taste
Mom’s Chicken Corn Soup without Rivels
Rivels: dough-y lumps can be added to soup for more texture
1 beaten egg
Add enough flour to make a moist doughiness of the mixture.
Break into small dumpling-like pieces and add to soup.
* * * * *
About 2 miles east of Mom’s house near Mt. Joy is Gus’s Restaurant. Gus is Italian, but his eatery is in Lancaster County, so aside from spaghetti, fish dishes, and fancy desserts on the menu, he offers ham loaf and pork and sauerkraut dinners with mashed potatoes for hearty Pennsylvania Dutch appetites.
A heavy meal, this dinner will give us enough fuel to make it to the Philadelphia Airport and then home to Jacksonville. Gus’s food is tasty, but Gus’s is a public place without a hoard of cooking aromas and shared memories from Mom’s Kitchen, her sacred space. In fact, it’s not a fair competition at all.
There’s no contest!
What favorite recipes do you savor during the fall season?
What are your memories of special dishes around the table with friends or family?
Coming next: Old Friends, New Friend: Homecoming @ EMU
July 2013 phone conversation between Aunt Ruthie and me:
M: Well, Ruthie, how are you doing?
AR: Well, I’m puzzled!
M: Puzzled? What about?
AR: I’m doing puzzles, doing “word find”! Ha ha ha! (Still witty at 95)
Teaching: Adoring teachers surround their retiring principal at Rheems Elementary School
Living for Others:
Receiving Salt of the Earth Award from Lutheran Social Services for ministry to refugees and immigrants
Music:
Playing the dulcimer 1996
Back to the piano at Rheems Nursing Home: Of the residents, many of them younger than she, her response: “They are poor souls. They probably wouldn’t recognize it if I repeated songs.”
Her schnauzer, Fritzie IV:
January 4, 2012 When her care-giver, nephew Mark has surgery, she remarks: “You and I, Fritzie, are orphans now.”
* * * * * * *
The school-teacher, principal, tax collector, family and church accountant, “mother” to dozens of refugees and immigrants has now landed on the spot of the calendar that says 95.
In July 2013, after falling at home, she recuperated at a rehab center and is now living at Landis Homes, a residence for seniors, many of whom are Mennonite, near Lititz, Pennsylvania. She has survived a pacemaker procedure and pneumonia in 2008, a hip break in 2010, and another fall this year. Yet she can still get out of bed, dress herself, and go places with her walker.
Hobbled by her falls and the natural progression of age, she’s no spring chicken, but she is still mobile. However, she finds her memory loss harder to deal with. The pilot light in her brilliant mind (she skipped 2 grades and had to have a chaperone at college because of her age) is now flickering during these last few years:
May 15, 2010 “Am I out of it?” she asks, dealing with the confusion that has set in.
May 17, 2010 “Sometimes I feel as though I must guard against a mental relapse.”
May 22, 2010 “I feel like a monkey on a stick.” Or a doll – Sue (then her housekeeper) comes “in the door, takes me off the shelf, dusts me off, and puts me back up again.”
Feb, 27, 2011 “I took care of my grandfather, my mother, and now, I have to be taken care of. I was hoping this wouldn’t happen to me!”
January 11, 2012 “I don’t trust myself to say the right answer.”
April 13, 2013 Though there is confusion about where she is and the day of the week, she still notices that the hands on her Bulova Caravel watch have stopped. She gets a new piece of jewelry on her wrist today–and a touch quilt!
TODAY IS HER 95th PARTY: Time to Celebrate
Sister Jean and Aunt Ruthie at the 95th PartyAunt Ruthie and Colleen’s touch quilt
Her Wit: She gets the Last Laugh!
At Landis Homes, conversing with her sister-in-law, my mother, who is the same age, has the same name, down to the middle initial:
Aunt: I want to go home to my house, my dog, my things . . . .
Mother: You have it good here, Ruthie.
Aunt: All I do is sit here. I could just as well do my sitting at home.
Mother: Here you have nice people to help you, good food, pretty flowers all around. Virginia Hoover, Simon and Mary Jean Kraybill from church, even Cecilia Metzler, my sister-in-law live here. And they all love it!
Aunt: Why don’t we just exchange places then? We have the same name. You could sit here just as well as I. No one would ever notice.
Announcing the WINNER of Blush: A Mennonite Girl Meets a Glittering World
And the Winner is (drum roll, please!) Carolyn Stoner! Thank you one and all for participating so heartily by commenting on my review of Shirley Showalter’s memoir BLUSH. Carolyn, you will receive your copy of Shirley’s memoir shortly.
* * * * *
Once upon a time there was a little boy named Curtis, who lived on Greenfern Lane in a very big city called Jacksonville. His Mommy Sarah and Daddy Joel invited his grandparents to feast on a wonderful meal with them one day.
While they were eating home-made spaghetti and telling stories around the table, his NaNa Marian told a new story, “The Tale of the Snow Globe.” Now when Curtis was new born, his Great Grandmother Longenecker came to visit him in the big city of Chicago. She wanted to see her new grandchild for the very first time. Of course, she had visited towns and villages and the cities of Lancaster and Harrisburg many times. She had even gone as far as Niagara Falls on her honeymoon. But she had never seen a big, big city with dozens of skyscrapers.
And then Great Grandma told how she went up, up, up many, many of stories onto the top of the Hancock building, where she could look out and see the Sears tower, the Amoco building and beyond. For a very long time, she stared and stared at the giant buildings and the miniature cars and buses below. Then she went to the gift shop and bought colorful souvenirs: tile coasters, postcards, and a beautiful snow globe with white flakes drifting down on the skyscrapers of Chicago she had seen. Her special souvenir was the snow globe, of course, which sat on a table by her telephone where she could see it day or night.
One day her special prize disappeared. She looked and looked, and had other people look with her, but the snow globe was nowhere to be found. Who could have taken it? Her cleaning lady? Visitors? Was there a break in she wasn’t aware of? The loss and the scary thoughts made Great Grandma very, very sad, NaNa Marian said.
At that very moment, Curtis said to his Daddy, “May I be excused?” After his Daddy said “Yes,” Curtis hurried into his bedroom and came back with his own Chicago snow globe, a larger version of his Great Grandma’s. “Here,” he said. “She can have this!”
“But, Curtis, you brought this down from Chicago to Jacksonville when you were only two. This is a special thing. Are you sure you don’t want to keep it?”
“Oh, I know, but I want Great Grandma to have it. It will make her feel better. You can take it to Pennsylvania in your suitcase the next time you visit her.” And that is exactly what happened.
My sheets are pinned to the backyard clothes line now, flipping in the breeze. Today I’m celebrating the end of our torrid Florida summer by hanging our sheets outside in the fresh fall air. Very old-fashioned and very retro. I guess I’m an Urban Mama!
Sheets blowing in sync with frond on banana tree in background
We live in the city, and I have a clothes drier, but today I am savoring the slow, sweet, luxury of sheets line dried fastened with wooden clothes pins, the kind with metal springs. No extra electricity, no pain for the sheets twirling endlessly in a hot, round drum.
When I was born, there were no automatic washers and driers. Most housewives back then used electric washers with wringers, not washboards. But clothes were dried by solar and wind power. A “new baby” card sent to Daddy from my Great Uncle Fritz attests to the line drying of diapers, the gauzy cloth variety fastened with medium-sized safety pins. But, trust me, my dad never hung a diaper or any other article of clothing on the line.
Card to my Dad Ray from his Uncle Fritz
What are your childhood memories of doing the laundry?
What unusual ways of drying clothes do you know about or practice now?
Map of Harlem, neighborhood in northern Manhattan, NYC
On the ground floor again, we breathe a sigh of relief as we spot the bus two blocks away ready to pick us up to go back to the mission. On the way to our mobile haven, we pass pawn shops armed like fortresses, lurid adult bookstores with XXX ratings, filthy-looking lounges, a stark store-front church.
Then we spot a gargantuan black woman with a red satin turban and purple robe–a bathrobe? a graduation gown? She’s “preaching” about Jehovah God in the middle of the sidewalk. I think she’s preaching until I see she is holding an upside-down Sears and Roebuck catalog as her bible and then inhale alcoholic fumes emanating from her body. We try to go around her, but this frightful creature grabs me by the shoulder in a death grip, and I am spun round and round in dizzying circles. There is little I can do to resist the grasp of this drunken prophetess. “Hazel, Hazel, help me,” I call out with a voice that feels somehow disconnected from my body. Hazel is astounded too and stands there immobile. I fall onto the scorching pavement as the woman lets go of me mid-air. By now Brother Paul and Sister Lois have raced up the street to our aid.
Someone deposits me across two empty seats on our bus. I am aware of heads hovering over me as a blurry hand wipes my face with a cool, wet handkerchief. We are going back to Brother Ernie’s mission on Eighth Avenue for lunch. It’s quiet for a few minutes. Then Brother Frank leads everyone in singing “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder, I’ll Be There” as we bounce across the avenues.
But I don’t join in. My head is buzzing with the pain of too many unanswered questions. Did the church elders know about the risks and think that telling us would discourage us from going? Did they come here innocent and ignorant like us and also get a rude awakening? Why didn’t Brother Ernie, now almost a New Yorker himself, give us more pointers?
Back at the mission, I have recuperated enough to eat our meal of home-made egg salad sandwiches and chicken corn soup brought up from home in ice chests, relieved that I have survived the jungle of Harlem.
BLUSH Contest closes tonight, October 2, 2013, at midnight! Here’s the link to the Contest Rules for a chance to win a copy of Shirley’s memoir:
Upcoming Review and Book Giveaway of Blush:A Mennonite Girl Meets the Glittering World by Shirley Hershey Showalter
On Wednesday, September 25, I will be reviewing Shirley Hershey Showalter’s new memoir – Blush: A Mennonite Girl Meets the Glittering World.
WHO IS SHIRLEY HERSHEY SHOWALTER?
Though Shirley and I both grew up Mennonite in the same county and in the same decade, our paths did not cross until I saw her website http://www.shirleyshowalter.com/ flashing across the screen in a class entitled What the Heck is a Blog? at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. I immediately recognized her name as Swiss Mennonite and probably of Lancaster County, PA origin. And sure enough, right on both counts. Since March 2013 we have become blogging pals, and I am thrilled to promote her book as the story of a life surprisingly parallel to mine, a story of derring-do!
DETAILS OF THE CONTEST:
WHAT: My review of Shirley Hershey Showalter’s memoir – Blush: A Mennonite Girl Meets the Glittering World.
PLUS: One lucky commenter will win a copy of BLUSH.
WHEN: Wednesday, September 25, 2013
WHERE: Right here on Plain and Fancy Girl
And all you have to do is show up, read my review and leave a comment.
The giveaway will close one week later on Wednesday, October 2, 2013 at 12:00 midnight. I will announce the lucky winner here and by email.
I invite you to come by and enter. Feel free to invite all your reading friends!
Shirley Hershey Showalter, author of BLUSH: A Mennonite Girl Meets a Glittering World
I promise: you will be transported, says Bill Moyers of this memoir. Part Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, part Growing Up Amish, and part Little House on the Prairie, this book evokes a lost time, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, when a sheltered little girl with big dreams entered a family and church caught up in the midst of the cultural changes of the 1950s and `60s.
With gentle humor and clear-eyed affection the author, who grew up to become a college president, tells the story of her first encounters with the glittering world and her desire for fancy forbidden things she could see but not touch. The reader enters a plain Mennonite Church building, walks through the meadow, makes sweet and sour feasts in the kitchen and watches the little girl grow up. Along the way, five other children enter the family, one baby sister dies, the family moves to the home place. The major decisions, whether to join the church, and whether to leave home and become the first person in her family to attend college, will have the reader rooting for the girl to break a new path. (Amazon Books)
Shirley Hershey Showalter, author of BLUSH: A Mennonite Girl Meets a Glittering World
Plain and Fancy 