We Are What We Choose to Remember

When sending my writing out into the world, I have no idea how it is going to affect other people and I am often surprised at comments that come my way. 

In April 2018 I wrote a blog post about the Greek singer, Nana Mouskouri, and her amazing energy. At age 83 she was doing a 14-day cross-Canada tour.  After I published the post, I received a long and emotional response from Hardy's cousin, Klaus Froese, in Germany. 

Both Klaus and Hardy enjoyed working in other cultures in their younger years; Klaus with MCC in Greece and Hardy with our church's board of missions in RD Congo. Their friendly outgoing nature, their love of languages, and their adaptability to difficult circumstances were an asset. 

In his long email comment, Klaus told me how Mouskouri's music had affected him after he left Greece. The people he had worked with gave him a bouquet of white roses as a farewell gift before he returned to Germany. Soon after he arrived back home, he went to get a haircut. In the barber shop the barber was playing Nana Mouskouri's "Weiße Rosen aus Athen" [White Roses from Athens]. Klaus was overcome with emotion and tears began streaming down his face. 

Now a 79-year-old man, Klaus recalled this moment of his youth as if it happened yesterday -- and his emotions welled to the surface once again!

https://youtu.be/fDV98mkueYU

Hardy and Klaus were very much alike and they remained in touch throughout their lives, first by visits and later by phone. Had it not been for World War II, the cousins would have grown up together. When they were five and seven years old, Klaus's family remained in Germany and Hardy's family emigrated to Canada.

In July, Klaus experienced a sudden weakness in his spinal chord and soon he was unable to hold up his head. Sadly (and far too soon), he passed away in November at age 82. We will miss his friendship and I will miss his enthusiastic support.

Klaus eating a last meal, his favourite potato salad.
After this meal, he was put on fluids because he lost his ability to swallow.

I recall a visit with Klaus and his wife Gudrun in Germany in 2011. We were in a beautiful park in the city of Hannover. As we left the park, we passed the main building. On the steps lay an empty wine glass. Klaus picked it up and handed it to me. "Keep it as a memory of your visit," he said with a smile. I still have it, and whenever I see it I remember our visit to Hannover. 

Do you have memories that make you smile, laugh or weep?

This blog post is dedicated to Klaus,
who was one of my most faithful readers.

 

Toni From Montana

Christmas is around the corner! It seems early this year as we already celebrated the first Advent Sunday at the end of November!

Before the internet, this would be the time I would get out my Christmas cards or special stationery and begin to write a letter, reviewing our family's activities throughout the year. Sometimes I just sent cards and wrote a letter in the new year, but there was always a letter!

That doesn't happen anymore. Letter writing is a thing of the past and I must say I miss it. It's so convenient to send off a quick email. Even if I want to convey more than a short hello, an email doesn't require a stamp or a trip to the post office, and the answer is minutes away, depending on the person at the other end, of course! I still walk to the mailbox a block away every day with a sense of anticipation, but personal missives are seldom found there!

Recently I read an article in the Winnipeg Free Press that sparked a memory for me. 

The Free Press published a photo of two girls (Margaret Hunt, left, and Marion Sheppard, right), taken in 1960. Both were born on the same day of the same year on farms 500 kilometers apart and have been writing to each other since 1951! They met several times over the years as well. They attended each others' weddings and exchanged photos of children and grandchildren.

I was probably 14 or 15 when I answered an ad in our church Sunday School paper requesting a pen pal. Her name was Toni Adkins and she lived in Montana. Unlike the girls in the picture above, we never met physically, and our lives were quite different from each other. Toni's father was in the military and the family had moved a lot. My family was Mennonite and we were conscientious objectors, but we too, as refugees and immigrants, had done our share of moving. Toni was a black American and I was a white Canadian. 

We wrote to each other all through our high school years. We didn't write about our differences but rather about what we had in common as teenagers. I wish I had kept the letters but I didn't. Somewhere I have a picture of her wedding but I can't locate it. She had a huge wedding with a bunch of bridesmaids and best men. After she got married, we stopped writing. Life got busy and we moved on. 

I wish I could write Toni and thank her again for something special she did for me one Christmas. I didn't wear makeup, I knew my mother wouldn't approve and I wasn't particularly drawn to it, otherwise I probably would have. Toni's present to me that Christmas was a nail polish kit, with assorted colors of nail polish, nail polish remover, etc. It made me feel like a princess and I loved it. Mom never said a word when I used it. To this day I can't be bothered with makeup, but I do wear nail polish on special occasions! And when I do, I remember my friend Toni, who added sparkle to my life one Christmas!

What unexpected joy has been brought into your life 

this Advent/Christmas season? 

Pass it on!

Let Me See Your Face!

November has arrived and with it the end of such a lovely but too short fall season and the beginning of another winter with its sleet, ice, and snow. 

 

A Canada goose sits at the edge of the lake,
contemplating its long journey south ... and I want to go along!

A Blue Jay enjoys the seeds scattered on our deck table.
He's in it for the long haul, just like we are!

I bring in my favorite plants -- the geranium that outdid itself this year and the gerbera that is just full of buds. This season lends itself toward a mood of melancholy sadness but these flowers and the birds by my window will cheer
me up. 

Hardy was given the above item at a craft sale at our church some time ago by a person who was selling handcrafted jewellery. He thought it might be a rosary but the person who gave it to him said it was not.
A relative of ours who had spent time in Greece with MCC told us the string of beads was called a kompoloi or "worry beads". These beads do not have a religious or ceremonial meanning but are simply used to pass away time, guard against bad luck, or, if expensive, as a mark of power or social prestige. Hardy and
I have been using it after our breakfast devotions to remember friends and loved ones who have passed away as well as their families. We simply take one bead at a time, hold it between our fingers and whisper the name we are reminded of. It is strangely comforting. 

We have enjoyed getting together with our friendship/care group for the first time since the coronavirus hit us. I discovered a wonderful storybook for children, written by Douglas Wood, that teaches some profound truths and is beautifully illustrated by artist Jon J. Muth.
I wanted to use it for a sermon I was preparing for church and borrowed it from a friend, who brought it to our care group get-together. We had a delightful time listening to Yayoi, a Japanese Canadian poet, read this book to us. 

             

                                         

The book ends with the following advice the Old Turtle gives to the little girl of the story: "Remember this, little one. The Broken Truth, and life itself, will be mended only when one person meets another -- someone from a different place or with a different face or different ways -- and sees and hears ... herself. Only then will the people know that every person, every being, is important, and the world was made for each of us."

I was charmed by an eight-month-old little girl at church last Sunday, who, when I last saw her, was still so babyish and now has blossomed into this gorgeous, inquisitive, relational little being. She stared at me intensely for several minutes and when I asked her caregiver (the baby is a foster child) why she was doing that, she said, "She wants you to take off your mask. She has a thing about masks."

When I took off my mask, the baby broke into an amused grin and studied my face intensely, reacting to every expression! 
I'm still thinking about that, and how we all need to take off our masks (not the ones to prevent the COVID virus from spreading, but the ones behind which we hide our genuine selves) and become real to one another.

"A little child will lead them."  

 Happy November everyone!

"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?