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It’s been a long, twisted route from writing letters at the dining table as a little Amish girl in the Midwest to typing a newspaper column on a desktop computer as a Mennonite woman in Oregon, over 50 years later.
Surely it was my grandma’s stories that set me on that path. Thanks to her, I know the magic power of words, and I can still see that panther silently leaping from tree to tree.
It was one of Mommi’s favorite stories, told to us in Pennsylvania German. She was probably 12 years old, the third of what would be 15 children in an Amish family. They lived in northern Michigan at the time, still somewhat untamed territory in 1902. She and her siblings brought the cows in for milking every evening, herding them along the lane between the pasture and the woods.
Normally the cows ambled to the barn, as cows will, but one night they raised their tails straight up in the air and ran home, panicked and terrified. The children ran after them. A panther, high above them in the trees and half-hidden among the leaves, leaped from tree to tree beside them all the way to the end of the lane. The children and the cows all made it home safely, but the terror was still in Mommi’s dark eyes as she told the story, and we could see and feel it all, the shadowy panther, the terrified cows, the desperately running children.
Mommi was born a Schlabach, a legendary family that survived pioneering, poverty, and a restless, capricious dad who moved them from one state to another every few years. Surviving by grit, ingenuity, and taking care of each other, they came to be known for their storytelling.
Recently I spoke on the phone to a woman from Ohio, Mary Schlabach Kauffman, who is one of my mother’s last remaining cousins. “The Schlabachs were storytellers,” she said. “They’d all get together and tell stories and laugh and laugh, and then the next year they’d have another reunion and tell the same stories and laugh again.”
I attended a few of those reunions as a child, and I remember the buzz of conversation and laughter, and especially great-uncle Levi standing with his foot up on a chair, leaning forward, telling a wild story to an enthralled group of nephews and nieces.
Mommi passed her storytelling skills to her children, especially my mom, Sara, and her sister Vina. They remembered details and related them with exquisite timing, as well as perfectly mimicking everyone from Bobby Possum the neighbor to Rox the horse, a stubborn mare who would suddenly decide to stand perfectly still no matter how much Mom and Aunt Vina clicked their tongues and pleaded. Telling the story, Mom would stand still and roll her eyes sideways just like Rox daring her to reach for the whip. If Mom so much as eased her hand toward the whip, she said, Rox would take such a wild leap forward she sometimes tore the harness from the buggy shafts.
Not only did they tell stories, these women wrote thousands of letters, not boring lists of how much bread they baked, but funny sketches, detailed stories, sharp insights, and bits of gossip.
“I was in a cousins’ circle letter with your mother for years,” Mary Kauffman told me, referring to an ongoing packet of letters that circulated among the group. “Your mother’s letters were my favorite. The letters came about twice a year. Some of the others would write about making garden and spring housecleaning in the spring, and in the fall they’d say they were canning the last of the fruit and doing the fall housecleaning. But when I read your mother’s letters, she’d write about their little farm and I’d say, ‘I can hear the chickens clucking!’”
Even in her 90s, when Mom’s life was mostly confined to her little farm in Minnesota, she sent me endearing details of the birds who came to eat the seeds she scattered on the snow and hilarious descriptions of the rooster who was in love with the old cat that had one ear missing. They went all over the farm together, she said, and he strutted along, all botsich [proud] of his lovely girlfriend.
Like my foremothers, I noticed details. I remember best the sounds of my childhood — laying my sleepy head on Mom’s lap in church as the slow chantlike German singing soared and swooped around me like a flock of barn swallows hunting for mosquitoes. I also recall the sound of the buggy wheels on a gravel road, raspy and echoing inside my bonnet, like having my head in a cardboard box and scratching the outside. No wonder, really, as Mom cut up Quaker Oats containers, covered in dark blue fabric, to make the stiff round brim that circled our heads from mid-cheek to behind our ears.
How does a little Amish girl with a German dialect as her first language grow up to write for an Englisch audience from the foreign world of TV and T-shirts and other wonders admired from afar?
When I think of the heritage I received of not only seeing details and humor, but of turning it into stories and writing it down, it’s not so hard to see the path that brought me here.
We couldn’t pick up the phone and call our grandmas, Kansas Mommi and Iowa Mommi, so, every month or two, Mom seated us around the dining room table with pencils and lined school tablets. It was time to write letters.
Even if we felt we had nothing to write about, Mom expected us to crank out at least a short note. We wrote in English, and most letters began with, “Dear Grandma. How are you? I am fine.” Eventually, we added sentences about school or the weather or the cat having kittens.
I learned skills I still carry with me as a 62-year-old Mennonite columnist in Oregon: to write on command and to meet deadlines. I didn’t realize, of course, that I was also learning the subtle skills of turning everyday life and ideas into words until, at about 12 years old, I suddenly enjoyed writing letters and wrote prolifically to a large variety of pen pals through my teen years and into my 20s.
My parents eventually left the Old Order for the Beachy Amish. I learned to drive a car and attended a public high school, a girl in long, solid-color dresses and a white cap among Lutherans in jeans.
I came to Oregon a few years later to teach in the Mennonite school on Peoria Road. Eventually I met Paul, and we were married in 1984. He was Mennonite, a denomination under the same Anabaptist umbrella as the Amish, with the same traditions of community and hard work, but with less distinction from the world at large.
During our eight years in northwestern Ontario, Canada, teaching First Nations students, I wrote form letters and sent them to dozens of friends and family, trying to describe our world of frozen lakes and the Ojibway culture, so different from my Midwestern Amish heritage. My first taste of publishing, it taught me how to connect with my audience and choose my words carefully.
In 2000, six years after returning to Oregon, I impulsively sent an essay to a weekly community feature in the Eugene Register-Guard. Shortly after, an editor phoned and invited me to write a monthly column called Letter from Harrisburg. I wrote that column for almost 19 years, until the paper was sold, and it led to opportunities for speaking and publishing that I could never have foreseen.
When I heard of Lookout, a new online newspaper forming in Eugene, I hoped they would have a role for me. They said yes, they do.
Does it matter if it’s a pencil on a school tablet at the dining room table or a clicking keyboard and a screen? The essential process is the same — living life with eyes and ears and heart open, listening and observing, and then turning it into words that let someone else in on the experience and the story.
In this twice-a-month column, I hope to carry on my grandma’s legacy and use the magic of words to connect, describe, and transport readers. Whether it’s the smell of grass seed harvests, the joy of family, or the adventures of travel, I’d be honored if you came along for the ride.
