In the movie based on Beverly Lewis’ best-selling romance novel The Shunning, pretty Katie Lapp senses something is missing in her simple Amish life. Then a fancy woman comes to Lancaster County looking for the baby girl she gave up for adoption nearly 20 years earlier. When Katie makes the connection between this woman and her own existence, she takes a bus to explore life beyond the boundaries of her Amish upbringing.
Cover image via Amazon
I’m not a character in a best-selling novel, but I did venture beyond the limits of my own Mennonite life to explore a different style of life. Unlike Katie, I wasn’t shunned. But, like her, I did take a bus, a Greyhound bus, to move on.
Today my story is featured on the blog of Mary Gottschalk, who got out of her own comfort zone by sailing the open seas with her husband in a 13,000 mile adventure she recounts in her memoir Sailing down the Moonbeam. Click here to meet this fascinating author and also read my post on stepping into a new world.
My mom still has the same vacuum cleaner she’s had for decades, a blue, bullet-shaped machine with a snorkel hose at one end. Think of a mechanical Dachshund, a hot dog with a waist-line problem. “It still does the job,” she says.
We are not quite as frugal or married to a brand as Mom though. As newly weds, Cliff and I bought a Filter Queen, a squatty brown thing that rolled along the floor on four little wheels, a vacuum cleaner that came with a great sales pitch: It could suck up marbles and had a Hepa filter: Picture the cone-shaped spaceship that returns from outer space, splashing down in the ocean: that’s the Hepa filter. The salesman also said it was clean enough to use on a submarine. Cliff experimented with the suck-up marble trick, but I don’t think he ever tried it on a submarine.
Vintage Filter Queen vacuum cleaner: image via eBay
A few years ago I was getting tired of my upright Kenmore vacuum, sick and tired of its spewing out more dust than sucking in. Usually we employ due diligence researching a good replacement, but Cliff was out of town on his spring tour, so I thought, “I can handle this myself . . . how hard can it be?” A woman with a mission, I went to Linens and Things, a chain store now defunct in Jacksonville, to check out my options. I totally discounted mainstays like Hoover and Electrolux sitting snugly side by side. Then I spotted a vacuum cleaner at 70 % off. (Going-out-of-business sale!) Overlooking its heft, I compared it to a cleaner parked close by in the showroom, a Dyson, my gold-standard at the time. “It would be perfect, sturdy and top of the line both,” I think.
When Husband came home, he just stared at my purchase open-mouthed and started laughing, then a wild guffaw. His comments: This thing looks like it can suck up the rug in one fell swoop. Why, it could even pull a red wagon with a child sitting in it around the block–a vacuum cleaner on steroids, that’s what it is. A turbo-charged Bissell beast!
I have to wonder: Can a vacuum cleaner help a writer find her voice?
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Here is the link to my entry in the Gutsy Story Contest now in progress on the website of author Sonia Marsh:
Plain and Fancy 