"You're a Small Thing and You Must Learn to Fight."

Hardy and I enjoy birdwatching, but usually just from our vantage point at the kitchen table. We have a bird feeder hanging right where we can observe the birds while having our breakfast. During this Covid time, our morning meals have been more drawn out, as we aren't going anywhere most of the time! I keep a list of the birds we see.  Sparrows, chickadees, and juncos are our most frequent visitors during the winter, but in spring and fall we also have robins, woodpeckers, blackbirds, blue jays, and goldfinches stopping by.

Recently we had a visitor we have not seen here before and we were quite horrified.
Hardy was standing at the kitchen sink rinsing some dishes and I was reading the paper at the table when he called me with a sense of urgency in his voice: "Look out the window, Ellie, quickly!" I did, and this is what we saw:

                   

The photo is a bit grainy as it was taken through the window. It's a hawk sitting on a birdhouse on our deck railing. In its claws is a small sparrow, squirming in pain while its predator is kneading it !

I probably disturbed the hawk while taking the picture and it flew to the neighbors' yard where it sat on their shed roof, a dark and sinister shadow, devouring its prey. 

A phrase from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's (1809-1892) In Memoriam  (that long poem he wrote while grieving the death of his friend) came to mind: "Nature, red in tooth and claw." Tennyson's poem was published a decade before Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, but the phrase "Nature, red in tooth and claw" quickly became a slogan for those both in opposition and in favor of Darwin's theory. 

Tennyson asks: Are God and Nature then at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams? 
So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life. 

His friend's death at the prime of life caused a crisis of faith in Tennyson's life. His way of coming to terms with it was to express himself in the form of a long poem.

While rereading the memoir I wrote for my grandchildren (Ellie's Story), I noticed that the mention of death and how I felt about it as a child occurs quite frequently. It is traumatic for children when they first become aware of their mortality, and I was perhaps exposed to it more as a child of refugees constantly fleeing for safety from one place to another. Gradually children learn to put that fear aside until they or their loved ones encounter death personally. The fear is often as bad or worse than the experience itself !

A book I am presently reading is Miriam Toews' Fight Night. The main character and narrator of the story is Swiv, a precocious nine-year-old girl about the age I am in the latter part of my memoir. She lives with her pregnant mother and her elderly grandmother; she is courageous but fearful. Both her mother and her grandmother have experienced the death of loved ones by suicide and Swiv absorbs their emotional pain in her small body. Toews' gritty humor helps me to enjoy this book with its dark undertones of fear, loss, and death.

    

Before reading Miriam Toews' latest book "Fight Night", I read Makhno and Memory by Sean Patterson. Patterson is a doctoral student exploring historical memory in Ukraine's Zaporizhia region over the course of the twentieth century.

"Nestor Makhno has been called a revolutionary anarchist, a peasant rebel, the Ukrainian Robin Hood, a mass murderer, a pogromist, and a devil," who was in conflict with the Mennonites in Southern Ukraine during the Russian Civil War (1917-21). In the autumn of 1919, Makhnovist troops and local peasant sympathizers murdered more than 800 Mennonites in a series of large-scale massacres. It was the beginning of a terrible time for my grandparents and my parents (the latter of whom were young children at the time). 

They were like the sparrow in the talons of the hawk.

However, there is another whole story of privileged landowners and poverty-ridden peasants that needs to be taken into account to put the whole event into perspective. Maybe Makhno was "the small thing" that had "learned to fight".

There are always two sides to a story and the hawk has his own tale !

The Courage to Write

Last October I blogged about a memoir-writing course for which I had registered online and how I was hoping it would help me complete writing my own story. I had already begun it for my grandchildren. It was my COVID project and was quite labor-intensive, as I was printing it by hand and drawing some pictures as well. But I kept at it, encouraged by the course and by 13-year-old Lena Kate, who called me on a regular basis to ask when the next chapter would be ready! (She and her younger brother Daniel are both story writers.)
I took a picture of each chapter after writing it and emailed it to Lena Kate and to our other seven grandchildren. When she received the latest chapter, Lena Kate printed it and put it in a ring binder. 

I was almost finished writing at the end of July (I had decided I would end my story at the time I began high school) and took everything along to a cottage we had rented together with our two Manitoba daughters and their families.
One evening I invited everyone to a reading of the first few chapters. I was sorry that Lena Kate and Daniel weren't there. (Our second daughter Anita and her family live in Ontario and unfortunately couldn't join us at the cottage because of COVID restrictions.) Each person received an invitation at supper designed by daughter Heidi. It was a fun evening!

         

When we returned from the cottage, I wrote the last two chapters and sent them off to Lena Kate to add to her ring binder. 

Somehow, I couldn't let go of my project. I decided to type and edit the handwritten pages on the computer and have spent the entire month of August doing that. I also took the risk of 'putting it out there' by sending typed copies of the chapters to my siblings. They encouraged me to keep at it!

While in the process of writing, I was quite astonished at what had all transpired during the first 12 years of my life! At that age, I was already a world traveller, having lived in Russia, Poland, Germany, Paraguay, and Canada! I think what amazed me most was the resilience and the courage of my parents. How did they keep their sanity and their faith in God through all these difficult times of upheaval? How did they manage to feed and clothe eight children, to keep us happy, and to raise us to be well-functioning adults with our own families and careers? It is an astounding labour of love!

An example of a memoir writer who encouraged me to continue was my Dad's cousin's wife, Marianne Pauls; "Tante Marianne" passed away recently at the age of 95.
Three years ago, when she was already in her early nineties, she wrote her life story for her family. She was reluctant to take on such a big project, but her children cheered her on, and once she began writing she never looked back. She wrote in German, her mother tongue, but I believe the book was also translated into English.
Quite by accident, a young Catholic girl in Czechoslovakia meets a Mennonite soldier/interpreter one evening at a movie theatre. They fall in love, war and upheaval separate them, but they find each other again and live a life that is not ordinary by any means. Reading her life story is like reading a novel!

I am looking forward to reading Miriam Toews' latest novel, Fight Night. In an interview with CBC's Shelagh Rogers, Toews tells her listeners that the novel is about her mother and the dynamics between her and her teenage grandchild.
Toews' mother has dealt with the darker side of life involving mental illness and suicide of beloved family members, but throughout it all she kept her sense of humor and fought to push death away.

Henry Nouwen writes in one of his devotionals:

Writing is a process in which we discover what lives in us ... . It opens up new spaces within us of which we were not aware before we started to write. To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know. Thus, writing requires a real act of trust. We have to say to ourselves, "I do not yet know what I carry in my heart, but I trust that it will emerge as I write." 

All Nature Sings: The Beauty, Brevity and Vulnerability of Life

How wonderful it was to spend a week recently with our Winnipeg children and grandchildren at a cottage near Lac du Bonnet -- swimming, observing nature, playing games, reading, cooking, eating -- just being together and enjoying life!

The owners of the cottage have made a flower garden that is full of amazing creatures. I have learned from our botanist son-in-law, Chris, what to look for in a garden like this:

 

Monarch caterpillar feeding on a milkweed plant

Milkweed leaf beetles procreating

(photo by Chris Friesen)

My wish, since becoming acquainted with this garden, was to see a monarch leaving its cocoon. That did not happen last summer and I was hoping it might this summer. I inspected the milkweed carefully every day but saw no cocoons about to open.

Then this:

Hardy was sitting on a bench close to the cottage, quite a distance from the milkweed garden, when he saw something hanging from one of the wrought-iron hand rests of the bench. He wondered what it was.
It turned out to be a monarch cocoon about to burst open!  Chris said he could not understand why a monarch caterpillar would cocoon on a metal bench so far from its normal habitat, the milkweed in the garden. We sat for a long time, hoping something would happen, as the cocoon had already changed from green to white. We finally had to go in for supper.

The next morning, grandson Ivan called me to look at the bench, and there on the railing sat a gorgeous monarch, drying its wings in preparation for its life journey! Again, I sat for a long time, hoping to see it take off. I had to leave, and when I returned it was gone! I wondered about this monarch and its future. It had settled in such a unique place, and then, when no one was watching, quietly slipped away.
I hoped a predator had not picked it up. I recently heard that the monarch is a threatened species, its population diminished by 80%! Another name for the monarch is "wanderer" and if this monarch survives it will cover thousands of miles to go to Florida or Mexico. The next generation will return to Canada in spring. No Covid restrictions! Life is precious but precarious for this monarch!

When we returned from the cottage, we noticed a black butterfly hovering over the dill and parsley I had planted in a pot on our deck. It was a black swallowtail.

Soon there were little black specks all over the plants. These gradually turned into ravenous caterpillars that pretty much cleaned out my dill! I wonder where they will all cocoon. 

These butterflies have caused me to ponder about several things: the beauty of life but also its precariousness and its brevity. What is the meaning of life, specifically my life?
I came across a poem recently that speaks to me about all of this:

This post is dedicated to:  

The unnamed children in residential schools who didn't make it home but quietly disappeared.

Our friends who slipped from their earthly bonds and to whom we could not say proper farewells
during this COVID time: 

Fred, Helen, Henry, Helmut, Ferd, Mary, Erhard, Alvina

You are loved and missed by many whose lives you touched.

 

COVID Dreams

"Isolation can make our brains crave social interaction like we do food and results in unusually vivid dreams," reads the headline of a CBC Radio post of May 2020.

A few days ago, on the CBC News, the host Adrienne Arsenault shared some of the research that has been done about dreams people are having during COVID. Although some had bugs or flies crawling inside their masks, more people dreamt about being stuck or unproductive or trying to catch a plane or bus and just not making it. "In other words, people didn't dream quite so much about the actual disease; what they dreamt about was being unable to do what they wanted to do. So this was probably a reflection of a more existential kind of condition," says Elizaveta Solomonova, a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University who specializes in sleep study. Another study done by Harvard Medical School associate professor Deirdre Barrett has resulted in a book called Pandemic Dreams, based on 9,000 dream submissions. 

I have had a variation of the same dream almost every night since the beginning of COVID restrictions. The dream is always about being in a social setting, and we're usually eating. It is mainly family- or church-related, about the people I interact with most often. Nothing frightening or weird happens in these dreams -- we're just eating and socializing with each other.

On a conscious level, I have not been miserable or frustrated. I've spent more hours on social media than I did before the pandemic and have not been as productive as I could be with all this time on my hands! Hardy and I have prolonged breakfasts, reading and discussing the daily paper and our Rejoice! meditation. I go to the backyard to water flowers and observe nature. I walk every day and I think I'm more motivated because I meet and greet people on the walk and I get to check my mailbox just before I get back (usually not much in there). Then I prepare supper and before retiring, we watch the news or a movie. 

Rebecca Saxe, a Canadian professor of brain and cognitive sciences who conducted a study on how our brains crave social interaction, writes to the participants: "We saw the same kind of responses in your brain to pictures of social interactions after isolation as we did on the days when you were hungry and looking at pictures of your favorite food."

Recently, as I was making granola which I have every day for breakfast, I was reminded of a trip Hardy and I took when we still lived in Ontario. We decided to visit various bed-and-breakfast places in the area. Although it was local and low-key, it remains one of my favorite memories -- just to be able to go wherever you want with no restrictions was something we took for granted.

At the Avon and John Bed and Breakfast in Stratford, we were served granola as one of the breakfast items. It was delicious and when we got home I regretted not having asked for the recipe. I sent an email requesting it and received it immediately. I make a double recipe and it lasts for approximately two weeks if I have it for breakfast every morning. I add fresh fruit (blueberries or raspberries are my favorites) and have a piece of toast and coffee with it.

The first social outing we had after the COVID restrictions were lifted was on June 22. People were allowed to visit outside with five persons from two different households. We received an invitation to a 90th birthday celebration for a friend with whom we had served in Congo many years ago. Jake Penner is a man who is young at heart, even though his heart is old! Jake and Anne had invited one other couple who always hosted us when we returned from Congo for home visits. We hadn't seen them in years and we had a wonderful visit with everyone!

When we invite people to our own home, I have the habit of keeping a dated record of meals I serve, the people who visited us, and what I served. (I wrote about this in a blog post of Aug. 8, 2016.)

Below you see my menu books:

There is a big gap in which there are no entries between Oct. 2020 and June 2021.
COVID restrictions were in force and in mid-October of 2020 we celebrated our son-in-law Chris's birthday by preparing the food, taking a 45-minute drive to their place in Warren, and enjoying the meal with Heidi and family outside on their deck. Our daughter Christine and her family joined us.
That was the last time we were able to eat together until June 2021 when we twice had brunch on our own deck, separately with each family!

On Canada Day, July 1st, we attended our first larger social gathering. We celebrated with three Rohingya families whom our Jubilee church refugee resettlement committee has helped to find a new home in Canada. There was lots of food -- some hot and spicy, some cool and refreshing, and some just plain delicious (we all dug into the [halal] Kentucky Fried Chicken!). Keeping in mind the sadness we as Canadians felt about the unmarked graves of Indigenous children, we observed a moment of silence. I shared the story of Joseph and how he was sold into slavery by his envious brothers and we discovered that their scripture also contains this story. That was an aha moment!

Since June 22, I have not had any dreams about social gatherings with family and friends!

What dreams have you been dealing with during this strange time?

Happy Birthday to Mom and Me!

I have now celebrated my second COVID birthday and, in spite of the restrictions, it was a joyful experience. My four sisters and I were looking forward to celebrating outdoors, which until shortly before my birthday was allowed with exactly five people, but then things got out of hand in Manitoba and even that was not any longer permitted. But I received lovely surprises at our front door: 

A delicious lemon buttercream cake, baked by my youngest sister Margaret

  

Beautiful cards and well wishes from family and friends. 

You will notice that these cards are handmade. That is one positive thing about this COVID experience: We have time to be creative. The one on the left is artwork done by my sister Ruth. The one on the right is from my friend Yayoi who does origami (Japanese paper folding art). In the center of the card is a beautiful flower that unfolds into heart-shaped petals.   

My thoughtful oldest daughter remembered my nostalgia about a rabbit storybook from my childhood (see March 2021 blogpost). She found it on Amazon and ordered it for me. 

The grandchildren also made cards and we had Zoom meetings with them throughout the day. 

Here's a link sent by a friend on how to have fun with the Happy Birthday song:

https://youtu.be/OaZveHbxAYs

 Preview YouTube video How to play "Happy Birthday" Like Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Bach and Mozart Piano by Nicole Pesce

I did some reflecting about the time I was born (May 1943) in Ukraine.

When my brother was born in 1941, the Germans were celebrating their victory over Russia, and my parents called their first-born Victor. They were able to resume church services, and both my parents were baptized. They were happy and hoped for better days.

(Pen-and-ink drawing by Teresa Pankratz)

Two years later, at the time of my birth, the Russians had defeated the Germans and our lives, as people who claimed German ancestry, were in danger. My parents called me Elfriede, hoping for peace (the word Friede is peace in German). Dad took Mom to the local hospital, but as soon as I was born, he checked us out because he had heard rumors that the Russians were sending all patients who identified as Germans into exile.

In October of that year (1943), our family left Ukraine by train -- first to Poland and then to southern Germany. After four years of refugee life, we boarded the Volendam, a passenger ship heading to Argentina.
Following another five years of pioneer existence in Paraguay, we emigrated to Canada.

When I asked my mother about her memories of these difficult years, she had no desire to talk about them. She told me that she couldn't remember the details because she was so busy just keeping track of us! She had two children in Ukraine, one during the refugee years in Germany, three in Paraguay, and two more in Canada!

 My parents celebrating their 25th anniversary in 1965. I am in the back row, second from left.

My mother and I share a birthday month, and tomorrow (May 30th) she would be 100 years old. Sadly, she passed away in 2008, at the age of 87, just before our family's move to Winnipeg. The above picture was taken at her last Christmas celebration. Regrettably, I couldn't be there as we were in Ontario preparing for our move. She wanted us to come; I think she sensed that it would be her last Christmas.  Early in January she quietly slipped away.

A poem in memory of my mother

My Mother's Hands  . . .

Rough hands they were, with cracks and crevices, 

carved there by caring for eight children and a homestead.

These hands drew water from a well, milked a balky cow, 

mixed manure to spread over dirt floors, washed and swept these floors,

cleaned children's ears and noses, 

sewed, laundered, and mended their clothes,

tended a garden and worked in the fields.

But more than anything, 

I remember that these hands kneaded the dough for our daily bread.

I can picture her now, 

back bent, head down, hands deeply immersed in the dough;

kneeling on a chair beside the table, I watched those hands in fascination.

The smell of the yeast dough is with me still.

Mother's hands kneaded it to supple elasticity until the strength of her went into it.

Deftly, she shaped the bread into loaves, pushed it into the hot clay oven.

I sat and watched until it turned golden brown.  

We ate it all, knowing that mother's hands would make more bread, the next day and the next.

In all our childhood years, strength from those hands, those cracked and work-worn hands

flowed into making bread.

 

What special memories do you have of your Mother ?

 

Listen to the Birds!

This is one of my favorite photos of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. They look like ordinary folks enjoying a  summer outing, and they look so happy. Philip, especially, is relaxed, his hat balanced on his knee. The picture was taken in 2003 on a sunny day at The Coyles of Muick, near the Scottish Aberdeenshire town of Ballater, by their daughter-in-law Sophie. In the background, we can see the mountain of Lochnagar.

This is the photo the queen shared on the eve of her husband's funeral (April 17, 2021), which would have been one of the saddest days of her life. He died at age 99.

"Grief is the price we pay for love."

Nearly twenty years ago, Queen Elizabeth said these words as she shared about grief and loss in the aftermath of the September 11, 2011 terrorist attack in the United States.

Her words resonated with me. Before Philip's death in April, Hardy and I lost three dear friends, two in February and one in March. When I was younger, and my mother would tell me about another one of their friends who had died, I listened sympathetically but thought to myself, "Oh, they lived a good long life and it was their time."

I didn't have that glib thought in my head at all when our friends passed away. Two of them were in their late eighties, and yes, they had lived a long life, but they were our dear friends.
One of them was younger than me, only sixty-nine. That in itself was tragic. Another was a gynecologist who had been with us in Congo and delivered two of our children by C-section, hosting me at their home to convalesce for a week after the surgery. The third was Hardy's friend since his youth who had chosen a similar path of service in an African country.
Not only is there sadness at never seeing them again in this life, but the thought of my own demise creeps into my consciousness and becomes more of a reality.

We had a sudden snowfall in April, which didn't help matters; I longed for spring and new life. Then there have been the COVID restrictions and we haven't been able to be with our children and grandchildren. We haven't seen our family in Ontario for over a year and a half! 

One of my sisters put into words what I was feeling:

Grief is an emotion that comes in unexpected and unwanted moments ... like late at night when you want to sleep but can't, or in the morning, after a night of sleep when you expect everything to be normal but it isn't. Then it comes in waves of uncontrollable sadness. You don't want to feel it but you have no choice, it will not leave you. You try to avoid it with various kinds of therapy and slowly the emotions are fewer, with longer 'happy' moments in between, until you find a new normal for yourself.

One morning I looked out the window and was quite amazed. Our maple tree was full of birds--not the little sparrows and chickadees that gathered around our bird feeder throughout the winter. They were red-winged blackbirds, and they were singing, long trilling sounds as they flashed their wings. They were migratory birds and they had returned! I had never seen that many birds in our tree at one time. It felt like they were messengers sent to cheer me.

That day I also heard a robin's song, very loud and insistent ... another sign of spring. I couldn't see the robin (it must have been up on our roof) but its song was beautiful and uplifting.

Today was a lovely day in May. This morning I checked our lilac bush which we planted from cuttings in my parents' yard a few years ago. Last year it had only one bloom. Now I noticed it was full of buds!

Our daughter came over and we walked around the lake near our house. Other people were out and about, walking their dogs, pushing strollers with smiling babies, riding bikes.

The world seemed almost normal again.

There is one favorite tree in which all the birds seem to congregate and we just sat on the bench and listened to the music, interrupted at times by the honking of geese. The lake was full of life and light.

https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/mcvmagazine/bird_songs_interactive/index.html

Happy Easter !

Going for a walk around our lake recently, I was amused by the first geese to arrive for the warmer seasons. They seemed puzzled as they carefully landed on what they assumed to be water but was actually still ice. They walked around tentatively and awkwardly. It reminded me of Hardy and me during this Corona pandemic. Everything is a bit unfamiliar and bizarre and we walk hesitantly where once we were confident and self-assured.
Our stage in life is having a similar effect on us!

We were excited when we were able to book an appointment for our COVID-19 vaccination. Hardy's appointment was earlier as he was in a higher age bracket; I got mine a few days later. We called and asked if we could change Hardy's so we could go on the same day. They changed it for us without a problem. 

We called our children to let them know. Our oldest daughter offered to take us and she had some good advice for us: "Make sure you take your walker, Dad, as you will be standing in line for a long time."
She was right.

The line was already quite long when we got there, but the weather was balmy. All along this seemingly endless line of seniors,  there were people in place ready with an encouraging word, a smile, a willingness to help. The whole process took about two hours. Once we got inside the Convention Centre, we were given chairs and a number. Once again, we were treated with kindness and respect. I was grateful to be Canadian.

As I looked at the long lineup, I was reminded of Jesus surveying a crowd of 5,000 or more who had come to listen to him and had nothing to eat. He had compassion and asked his disciples to feed them. They didn't know how they would do it, but miraculously all were fed.

I  noticed that many came with canes or walkers and that hardly anyone came alone. Older couples came together, single seniors were accompanied by an adult child or grandchild, lovingly concerned for their welfare. I wondered about the stories of their lives ... . 

I could hardly fathom that we were now at that stage of life where our elderly parents had been not all that long ago. I recall my Dad leaning on his walker, saying to me, "Na, tjitj mol de Ola doa." ["Look at that old guy there"]. He was pointing to someone no older than he was, walking rather unsteadily with his cane!

I thought of my Mom, always busy, always doing something for others, until it was time for her to fold her hands in her lap and let others take care of her. That was hard for her!

We were amused by a couple seated just ahead of us. The man had his partner's pink purse decorated with purple butterflies hanging over the handle of his walker.  It reminded me of the promise of spring and of new life.

Things will get better!   Easter is just around the corner.  Christ is risen, He is risen indeed!

Happy Easter!

Communion elements and flowers delivered on Maundy Thursday by the deacons of our church
in preparation for our Easter service