When I was a young girl growing up in Mennonite country, I visited my grandparents on their farm nearly every weekend. A city(ish) girl, nothing on the farm ever stopped being a novelty. My sister and I spent hours crouched in the barn, coaxing semi-feral cats to come for a sniff and a pat, or teaching new kittens to drink milk from a saucer by dunking their noses in the dish.
I left the farm for the last time when I was thirteen years old, to live with my father in Calgary. In the last years, while reclaiming my Mennonite heritage through writing Mennonites Don’t Dance and reconnecting with a Mennonite Bretheren Church, I’ve begun to understand the depth of what I lost back then, even though, at the time, there was no way to hold onto it. While I returned for visits, the farm was no longer my farm, and the family there no longer knew how to look at me.
What I remember most, even more than the barns and outbuildings, the cats and grasshoppers, is my grandmother’s cooking. Mennonite to the core, her traditional recipes are ones I return to again and again to remember what it felt like to go home. And I remember my grandfather, reading from his Bible every morning, translating into Low German as he went. Although I never learned to speak or read the language, the sound of Scripture, to me, will always be Plautdietsch
This year is my mother’s 65th birthday and I think I have just the thing for it. Not something shiny or decadent, although a 65th birthday deserves both. Lately a woman in my Bible study group mentioned that a Low German Bible is now available. After much searching online, I found and ordered two. One so Mom can read God’s word in the language of her childhood. One for me, to use in my writing. And just to have a little bit of home where I can reach it.