Plautdietsch

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.

metamorphosis

It’s a jolly good thing no one told me that public speaking comes to those who write. Although, to be honest, there’s a boat load of things I kind of knew but chose to forget while working on Mennonites Don’t Dance. For instance, when dipping my pen nib into people’s lives and characters, wondering what the consequences might be, I thought to myself, There’s a better than good chance I’ll never find a publisher, anyway! See how consoling delusion can be?

Now, though, the book is almost ready. And in a few months, once the stories become a book, the metamorphosis of a hermit to a confident solo speaker who flits from stage to stage, must also find some path to completion. Anyone know where to find a good chrysalis?

In the meantime, though, a limited edition print of the artwork used for my book cover just arrived in the mail! It turns out that Madalina Lordache-Levy’s award-winning piece, “The Suicide,” was not only what Mennonites needed to turn it from words on paper to something that can be touched and felt, but was also exactly what was missing from the wall above where I write.