Shadow Land

The month of January is a time for reflection. I am by nature someone who likes to do that; it has been a habit since my youth. Of course, I had no idea what life held in store for me, but I had my dreams.

Shortly after graduating from high school, I moved to Winnipeg from Alberta and got a job at the Christian Press, a small bookstore above its printing press. I was hired because of my knowledge of German. It was a bookstore that marketed English and German books. I could read any book I chose -- heaven was at my doorstep!

This place will always be special to me because it is where I first met the person with whom I would spend the rest of my life. He was a student at the nearby college. For two years (after only one date), we were continents apart and maintained a letter-writing relationship. (Hardy was in the Congo from 1965-1967 as a member of a Bible translation team.)

I clearly recall sitting at my desk on the last day of 1966 and writing a letter in which I promised my commitment and love. In that letter I shared a poem by Dietrich Bonhoeffer which we continue to read together on New Year's Eve. We love reading it in the original German but I found a good English translation to share with you. 

A bit of background about Bonhoeffer: A Lutheran pastor, theologian and anti-Nazi dissident, he was imprisoned by the Nazis on April 5,1943. For an entire year he was separated from his family, his friends, his fiancée, and his church. He spent the time behind bars in Berlin's Tegel prison for his participation in plots to kill Adolf Hitler. 

In the damp cold darkness of his cell, bereft of light, family, and friends, Bonhoeffer wrote his last theological work, a poem addressed to his fiancée Maria von Wedemeyer, entitled, Von Guten Mächten Wunderbar Geborgen. This poem has since been made into a hymn and can be found in the German Lutheran hymnal, the Evangelisches Gesangbuch. (An English translation follows.)

Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazi SS on April 19,1945. He was 39 years old.

By Gracious Powers:

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Prayer for a New Year

By gracious powers so wonderfully sheltered

and confidently waiting, come what may,

we know that God is with us night and morning, 

and never fails to greet us each new day.

The worries of the old year still torment us,

we’re troubled still by long and wicked days.

Oh Lord, give our frightened souls the healing

Which you’ve prepared for us in many ways.

And when this cup you give is filled to brimming

with bitter sorrow, hard to understand,

we take it gladly, trusting though with trembling,

out of so good and so beloved a hand.

Yet when again in this same world you give us

the joy we had, the brightness of your sun, 

we shall remember all the days we lived through

and our whole life shall then be yours alone. 

Bonhoeffer did not know what fate awaited him and where life would take him. He had his moments of despair, expressed in the poem Wer Bin Ich? (Who Am I?), of which the final two lines are:

Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.

Whoever I am, thou knowest, Oh God, I am thine.

When we first read this poem to each other, Hardy and I had no idea what awaited us. In our latter years we have the privilege of looking back and seeing the path we walked; at times it was so difficult we didn't know if we would make it or not. This time of isolation during the Coronavirus epidemic is one of the more challenging times but not the worst.

We trudge along in the darkness and coldness and isolation,

wondering what lies ahead.

But we are not alone.

Yet when again, in this same world you give us 

the joy we had, the brightness of your sun,

we shall remember all the days we lived through

and our whole life shall then be yours alone.

It's a Small, Small World

Our "grandcat," daughter Heidi's Turbo, loves to crawl into small spaces, the smaller the better. He squeezes himself  into all kinds of boxes and baskets, kneads the ground beneath him and purrs contentedly, his tail curled around him. I look at him and wish I could be as content in my confined space as he is. Some days are better than others!

This Advent season seems different than any we have experienced while living in Canada. Added to the threat of the Coronavirus (which means we all stay at home, especially seniors like us who are most vulnerable), we experienced a medical emergency at the end of November. Hardy was not well for several days. With the hospitals overcrowded due to the epidemic, we were reluctant to go to Emergency, but on the advice of a good friend who is a nurse we went. He was admitted immediately as his condition was more serious than we realized. He had a strangulated hernia and a twisted intestine, and after they did all the tests, they did a laparoscopic procedure in the early morning hours. I could not go in to see him, but I spoke to a lovely nurse who took all my frantic calls and assured me that he was doing well. My sisters sent prayers and delicious noodle soup and muffins.

One morning I went to our mailbox just wishing for something to cheer me up. I reached in and pulled out a flyer. Then I felt something way in the back of the box. I retrieved a small blue envelope. It was from granddaughter Sasha (Turbo's caregiver) and it was addressed to "Oma." In it were some loving words and some hearts. It made my day!

Sasha's blue envelope reminded me of our years in the Congo (1965-1984). We lived for those blue aerograms from home, especially during the Christmas season. All we could do was write and receive letters, hoping that the mail would get through; sometimes it did and sometimes it didn't. 

Our situation now during the Coronavirus pandemic, with our province in lockdown, reminds me of the sense of isolation and insecurity I felt in Africa, during the early years, before I knew the language and the people. Although we took our anti-malaria pills faithfully, there was always the threat of malaria, particularly during the humid rainy season at Christmastime. However, we usually found something to cheer us up and make us laugh.
Our African gray parrot stayed with friends for a couple of months while we went home on leave. They taught him to say something he repeated over and over after our return: "Hardy has a pr... ." The parrot never finished the sentence and we couldn't understand what Hardy was supposed to have until our friends laughingly finished the sentence: "Hardy has a problem!" His problem at that time was a ruptured appendix requiring emergency surgery.

It's important to find things to make us laugh and feel loved while we are confined to a small space. We can't change the situation, so we might as well get comfortable like Turbo! 

Going for a daily walk helps, and many people in our area are doing that, especially during these exceptionally mild December days.
The other day I saw a couple taking their small child for a ride in a sled, the dad pulling and the mom walking behind. The little one kept falling off, not yet having a proper sense of balance. Finally the mom got on the sled as well and the dad pulled them both, end of problem!

 

On the same street is a huge teddy bear that opens its arms wide when I approach and closes them in a hug. Always makes me smile.

Then there are the "back-deck window visits" we get from our daughter Christine and family. We look at each other through the window and use our phones to communicate. They brought Hardy (who came home after three days in hospital) one of his favorite meals which he and grandson Ben often enjoy when they go out together.

When I think back to that first Christmas in Bethlehem, it seems that this year Christmas is much more like that first one. Confined to a small space, with the animals crowding around, a bed of hay for a cradle, far away from home and loved ones -- that was not the ideal way to celebrate a baby's birth. But then there were the shepherds and the angels and later the wise men with their gifts.

In the midst of uncertainty and confusion, may you experience some extra special blessings this Christmas season!

           

"Let Me Count the Ways"

How do I stay happy on bleak November days?  Especially when COVID-19 keeps me isolated?

"Let me count the ways," as the English Romantic poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), said about her love for Robert Browning whom she met after years of isolation and illness due to a spinal injury and a lung ailment. Her example of courage in the face of adversity gives me hope! (See How Do I Love Thee in "Sonnets from the Portuguese" -- 1850.)

I'm so happy that the weather, which was really ugly at the end of October, has changed and we are given  a few more days of sunshine and milder temperatures. What a miracle!

When we were digging out our winter clothes, granddaughter Kathryn happened to be here with us. She looked at the twin scarves Hardy and I had in the closet and said, "Oma, look at the brand names! These must have been expensive. Where did you get them?" 

I received them for Christmas one year from my students, mostly Korean and Chinese, whom I tutored privately at home and at Rockway Mennonite Collegiate. The memory of that Christmas party at our house makes me happy. And so does the touque I'm wearing, which says CANADA on it.

I have the privilege of being a citizen of this great country. I can go for a walk along the lake close to our house and meet fellow Canadians, all enjoying the last days of autumn. The Canada geese are mostly gone now, although there are still some flying across the sky making their strange honking noise.

As I walk I remember my loved ones, those who have gone before me and those who are still with me. I stop at the pussy willow bending low over the lake. It reminds me of my mother.
Earlier, in spring, there was a mother duck with eight ducklings under that willow tree (my mother had eight children). Later I only saw seven and I wondered what had happened to the eighth one.
My brother passed away recently, the first of us siblings.
I stop at the willow and I bless my mother and my three brothers.

I go around the bend and meet up with five pine trees, straight and tall, bravely enduring the cold days, and the colder ones to come. They are my four sisters and me, standing together, in good times and bad. We can't meet physically these days, and we miss each other. I stop at the five pines and I bless my sisters.

When I get home, the sun is setting behind the huge maple in our backyard. This maple has not yet dropped its leaves and only the leaves of one branch have changed color! I marvel at the bright oranges and yellows of the setting sun, and I thank God for my life, and that I am strong and healthy like this maple tree. I got the flu shot recently (for the first time in my life, as I'm not usually plagued by the flu) and I hope that the COVID vaccine will soon be a reality.

                

Our house is warm and cozy, and my autumn décor makes me happy. I brought my ceramic butterfly inside; it reminded of the day I went to Crock A Doodle with daughter and granddaughter to make it.

      We didn't carve pumpkins with our 

      grandchildren this year, but Sasha 

      sent a picture of the pumpkin she 

      carved at school. It looks like a 

      happy pumpkin!

I'll be baking  peppernut cookies early this year (it's a Christmas tradition). Two of our grandchildren in Ontario have birthdays in November and they will need a care package to cheer them up, since we haven't seen them all year!

My sister Ruth enjoys painting rocks and giving them as gifts to people. This one encourages me to remain positive during dismal wintry COVID days! It reminds me of my Dad who had a birthday in November. He was always my rock and continues to be that for me. November is also the month in which my parents got married. I say a prayer for them; a prayer of thanksgiving and gratitude:

Blessed are we who hold in our hearts

our beloved family and friends we have lost.

those who have loved so hard and endured so much,

whose earthly story has now been told.

O God, you alone know the whole of it.

You know their sufferings, their joys, their hopes,

their winding paths and every movement of their souls

and ours too, as our lives touched.

                                                           (excerpt from 'a blessing for the day we mourn our dead' by Kate Bowler)

"Life Sentences"

Something new for me during this COVID-19 time is a memoir-writing course I'm taking via Zoom through Canadian Mennonite University's 55-Plus Enrichment Program, Xplore. The instructor is Larry Danielson; thirty seniors are participating, of whom I know seven personally! 

Larry calls his course "Life Sentences."  He deserves an A for that title, which is pretty clever!  His wife Myra is also involved, helping to organize things. So he gets an A+ !

The first requirement for this course was to write a brief biography introducing ourselves to the class and to the instructor. Immediately there was a problem -- how does one summarize a life of seventy plus years in a few sentences? I wrote too much, I knew it was too much, but I checked with my copy-editor husband, and, yes, it was a bit long! So, reluctantly, I whittled it down to a few sentences and sent it off. Larry sent us copies of all the biographical blurbs. Every life is a story!

"Parents rarely let go of their children, 
so children let go of them. 
They move on. They move away. 
The moments that used to define them are covered by 
moments of their own accomplishments.

 
"It is not until much later, 
that children understand;
their stories and all their accomplishments,
sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers,
stones upon stones,
beneath the water of their lives."

Paulo Coelho

Here we are with our mother on the way to Canada in Asunción, waiting for our visas. 

(Not sure why Dad isn't on the picture.)

I'm the taller girl, nine years old, at the top right beside my Mom.

Two more girls were born in Canada.

In 2009 I was finally at that point where I understood what Coelho so elegantly expresses in the poem above. Hardy and I went to Paraguay to attend the Mennonite World Conference. However, my main agenda was to go back to the place our family left when I was nine -- the village of Einlage in the Mennonite Colony of Neuland. I contacted former classmates who still lived there. Helga and her brother Gerhard were willing to take me where I wanted to go.

And so I went. And nothing was the same. Nothing the way I remembered it. The village was no longer there. The place where we lived was occupied but nothing about it was as I remembered it. I was profoundly disappointed.

We attended the conference after that. But I couldn't get over my disappointment. Browsing through a display, I came across a small green booklet. It was written in honour of the 25th anniversary of the founding of Neuland. I turned the pages. In it were all the stories written by the people who experienced what I remember as a child. 

The place became alive once again, and I knew that I had not imagined what I remembered. I was happy to find the story of my father and another man beginning to establish a church in that wilderness.

I regained my equilibrium.  That is the power of story-telling!

I knew I needed to harness that power in telling my own story. I began doing so by writing this blog. Posting once a month, eleven years later I have decided  to write my story for my grandchildren! Writing it for them helps me get rid of the invisible critic always sitting on my shoulder telling me what I'm writing is not good enough, doesn't measure up. I am amazed at what my parents were able to endure and how courageous they were! 

I'm writing the story by hand, actually printing it because my grandchildren don't read cursive. Our thirteen-year-old granddaughter, Anita's Lena Kate, designed a cover for the book and prints each chapter as I email it to her and the other grandchildren. She suggested that Opa write his story and designed a cover for him as well!

        

 

Lena Kate's book covers

Recently I got a call from a former client for whom I did some translating. As a young child she endured horrific abuse from a parent and has had recurring night terrors as a result. On the advice of her therapist, she began to write her night terrors in the form of a horror story ... and she no longer experiences these nightmares! She will be self-publishing the book in the near future with the help of our local McNally Robinson booksellers and is excited about doing so. 

Writing can be therapeutic. It is that for me. It's about "finding peace within yourself and offering it to the world," as Mennonite poet Sarah Klassen said in an interview about her latest book of poetry, The Tree of Life.

Have you told your story?

Sitting Down Quietly

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, Anita & Bryan and their four children (our "Ontario family") could not join us for a planned cottage holiday at the end of July. Despite our disappointment, it was a wonderful week, away from the city, surrounded by nature.

One morning Heidi, our youngest, was standing at the kitchen sink by the window, when she excitedly motioned for me to join her. By the time I did, the beautiful humming bird she had just seen and wanted to show me was gone. She suggested I sit on the porch where she had seen it and it might come back.
I did and, before too long, there it was! Not only was it there, but it came up close to me and hovered around me as if I were a flower from which it could get some nectar. It was quite an experience.
I didn't capture the incident on camera, but it remains a vivid image in my mind and a reminder of what I miss when I don't allow myself to just sit quietly.

I believe my true nature is to be contemplative, but I was taught by example more than anything that this is a waste of time. My mother always had plenty for me to do; she did not look kindly on what she probably considered to be procrastination when it actually was contemplation!  Although
I must admit it was plenty of procrastination as well!

There was a butterfly garden at the cottage with lots of milkweed. I noticed our son-in-law, Chris, a botanist, walk around it quietly observing. He pointed to a butterfly chrysalis, hanging from a stem of milkweed, much resembling the leaves and stem from which it was suspended. It looked like a small treasure chest with a gold band of beads around it.

(Photo: Chris Friesen]

This was the first time in my long life that I had seen a chrysalis! I wondered, "What else have I missed"? I wanted very badly to see a monarch crawling out of its chrysalis but that didn't happen.

One morning, while sitting quietly on the dock, I heard a splashing sound. I looked and saw a strange and interesting creature that resembled a duck yet it was different. Its bill was longer and thinner and it dove from the surface. In all my seventy-plus years I had never heard of nor seen a cormorant. I learned that the Chinese and Japanese used cormorants for catching fish. They are actually more common in Manitoba than I realized and are considered a nuisance.

I did not know that bees sometimes make beehives on the ground. On a walk one morning while crossing a ditch, I almost stepped on one!

The German poet, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1797-1848), (whose impossibly long name I still have trouble spelling correctly!), spent hours in nature, literally with her ear close to the ground, listening to its sounds, becoming one with it. From this observation and quiet contemplation sprang beautiful lyrics that made her one of Germany's most famous female poets.

I fell in love with her work while studying German literature at the University of Waterloo. In 1992
I had the privilege of spending a summer in Germany close to the Münsterland where Droste-Hülshoff spent much of her life, and that inspired me to write my MA thesis on her work ("The Lady of Shalott" A Comparison of Selected Lyrics of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff and Alfred Lord Tennyson). She spent a great deal of her later life in Meersburg, South Germany, which Hardy and I were able to visit in 2011.

We have a new bird feeder, given to us by our children, and we have hung it so we can watch it from our breakfast table. This fall and winter we hope to see a variety of birds enjoying their feast, while we delight in observing them.

"Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, 

but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you." (Nathaniel Hawthorne)

Are We Listening?

Hardy and I have been watching The Book of Negroes, a six-part  TV miniseries . Based on a novel by Lawrence Hill, ( 2007) it depicts the harrowing journey of Aminata Diallo from Niger, West Africa to South Carolina in the United States, and her return home after being forced into slavery as an eleven-year-old child.  I read it in 2009, and in light of what is happening around us, this is a good time for me to read it again.

Lawrence Hill uses Aminata's voice to emphasize the importance of story-telling. In the novel, Aminata says:
"I saw things that the people of London would never believe. They cannot know what we endured if we never find anyone to listen. In telling my story, I remember all those who never made it through the musket balls and the sharks and the nightmares, all those who never found a group of listeners, and all those who never touched a quill and an ink pot."

Slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1833 and in the Americas in 1865, but racism continued to flourish. Although Lawrence Hill's novel was published in 2007 and won acclaims and awards worldwide, it did not seem to change the plight of people of color much. They are still being discriminated against, even by those who are supposed to set things right, our law enforcement officers.

As a young child, African civil and human rights activist Ella Baker (1903-1986) listened to her grandmother's horror stories of life as a slave. She wrote: "In order to see where we are going, we must not only remember where we have been, but we must understand where we have been".

If story-telling brings to our memory those who endured and causes us to think about the events that happened in their lives, we can begin to understand and thus change can occur. But why does it happen so slowly, and why do we continue to repeat the same mistakes? Probably we aren't listening.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I am writing the story of my childhood for my grandchildren and sending it to them a couple of pages at a time. One grandchild reminds me when I haven't sent anything for a while, so someone is reading and that makes it worth my while.

Last week our extended Winnipeg family of ten was together at a cottage near Lac du Bonnet, about 90 minutes northeast of Winnipeg. Unfortunately, our Ontario family with half of our eight grandchildren could not join us because of the coronavirus pandemic. There was a glimmer of hope early on, but Manitobans wisely decided it was not yet time to open the borders. We are still hoping that we can see them in October. We have stories to tell each other!

"Beyond the Face of Fear"

Growing up in a Mennonite village in the Paraguayan Chaco I had little exposure to the outside world. There were no stores and the only time we experienced a small window into that other world was when MCC sent Christmas packages (in which even the toothbrushes, toothpaste and soap were exotic items to be marveled at) or when our Oma sent us parcels from Canada.

My world expanded shortly after I turned nine. That year our family travelled to Asunción

(the capital city) to wait for our visas so we could join my Mother's relatives in Canada. Our family of eight (soon to be nine) spent several months in an MCC house there with a number of other families. I remember going on excursions with my Dad, especially to the markets. I saw a beautiful doll the size of a baby, and more than anything, I wanted that doll for myself. I begged and pleaded, but my Dad sadly shook his head, telling me we could not afford such luxuries because we had "Reiseschuld" (travel debt). I heard that word many times and I hated it !

When we finally received our visas and were on an airplane going to Rio de Janeiro, we had another experience that broadened our horizons. The stewardess passed out a delicious treat in a little decorative cardboard container wrapped in silver paper. When you unwrapped it and smelled it, it was as if heaven was at your door! The chocolate was divine! Then there were little packages with small white-coated squares of different flavors, which we could chew but shouldn't swallow our Dad told us. They were called Chiclets. We were amazed!

Behind me sat a girl about my age and she had a doll on her lap similar to the one I had seen at the market. She was travelling by herself and the stewardess was solicitous toward her. They spoke Spanish with each other, a language I did not understand. I wished I could ask the girl to be my friend, maybe then she would let me hold or even play with her doll for a bit. I had no words, so I just got up from my seat and went to her. Tentatively I reached out and touched the beautiful doll. The girl jerked her doll away from me and rang for the stewardess. I could not understand the words but they certainly sounded angry and accusatory and I went back to my seat, hurt and ashamed.

When the stewardess returned with treats for everyone, she deliberately passed me by and I got nothing. That was my punishment.

I was reminded of this rather traumatic event in my own life by a recent article in the Winnipeg Free Press (July 7, 2020). The article was about a white woman in New York's Central Park who had let her dog roam unleashed in a secluded bird-watching section of the park. This was against the rules. When she was reminded by "an African-American man" to keep her dog on a leash, she became belligerent and wouldn't comply.

The man began to record the incident on his phone; that is when she called 911, claiming that an African-American man was threatening her and her dog.
Not so many years ago, this black man, calmly insisting a white woman should obey the law, would have been lynched for even daring to approach her in this way. Most likely he would have also been accused of molesting her.
However, the woman was charged under an existing false-report law which doesn't reference race. "It also inspired New York state lawmakers  to pass a law that makes it easier under civil-rights law to sue an individual who calls a police officer on someone 'without reason' because of their background, including race and national origin."
The woman apologized after being charged and fired from her job.

When I read the article, I knew exactly how Christian Cooper, the man in New York City's Central Park, must have felt, and I was happy for the woman's apology (probably given under duress), saying she had "reacted emotionally and made false assumptions about Cooper's intentions."

I never received an apology.

I was blonde and fair; the little girl with the doll was dark and so was the stewardess. The misunderstanding occurred because of a language barrier, but also because of a lack of sensitivity on the part of the stewardess. 

Racism exists at all levels by the people who are in power and it is hurtful!