This chapter didn’t make it into my memoir, even though it was one of my favorites. It holds happy and satisfying memories that make me wish I could sneak back into the past for an afternoon—to sit and watch Grandma iron and listen to her stories. Maybe ask her a few questions I didn’t know to ask at six or seven.

I opened my eyes. The sun was shining, and for a moment I couldn’t remember what day it was. I savored those few moments when anything was possible. Who knew what might be about to happen? Then I remembered coming home from church last night. Today was Monday, Grandma’s washday, one of my favorite days of the week.

Even before I went downstairs to have my hair combed, Grandma had taken all the dirty clothes and sheets to the basement. She needed to start the wash as soon as possible, so there was no time for stories as she braided my hair. When she finished, I followed her down the worn steps to the cool basement, smelling of damp earth, musty wood, oil that dripped from the furnace, and Grandma’s lye soap. Her sturdy Maytag washing machine stood on the rough cement floor waiting for us. Beside it, two galvanized square rinsing tubs rested on a wooden stand Grandpa had made years ago. A bare light bulb hung on a cord from the ceiling. This was not like magazine pictures I looked at where a smiling woman in a ruffled white apron, with bright red lipstick and high heels, stood over a gleaming new automatic washer in a pristine, shiny-floored room. She was doing “laundry.” We did the wash, a much less glamorous activity.

Using a hose connected to a small sink, Grandma began by filling the washer with water too hot even for her hands. As it filled, I helped her sort the wash into piles—white sheets and underwear, light-colored dresses, Grandpa’s dark socks and garden clothes. Then Grandma dropped sheets and pillowcases into the steaming water and punched them down with her faded silver-gray stick, worn satiny smooth from years of use. The end of the stick felt almost as soft as the bristles of a baby’s hair brush. I watched the clothes slowly churn their way around the washtub. When it was time to transfer them to the rinse tub, Grandma dipped her washing stick into the water and lifted out the end of a sheet, holding it aloft for a moment, to cool it enough for her fingers, and then started it through the wringer.

I wasn’t allowed to put things through the wringer. Grandma told me, for the hundredth time, the story of Uncle Bob getting his fingers caught in it when he was little. The wringer pulled in his fingers, hand and then arm. Without thinking, she reversed the wringer, rolling his small arm back out between the two cylinders. He almost fainted. She should have disengaged the wringer, she explained, which would have separated the cylinders and freed his arm.

Partly because of this potential danger, but even more because of its almost magical workings, the wringer fascinated me. All that needed to be engaged was the merest tip of a towel or sheet, and the entire piece would be pulled through with no additional effort by Grandma.

My favorite part of wash day was the pillow case trick. Usually, Grandma ran them through the wringer, closed end first, but if I asked, she gathered the open edges of a pillow case together and started it through the wringer that way. As it was pulled through, air was forced back into the case, blowing it up like a balloon, only to be deflated at the final moment with a gratifying whoosh. I wanted Grandma to do it again, but she said it was hard on pillow cases and wouldn’t do another.

After that excitement, I turned my attention to the rinse tubs where I could dip the clothes up and down, swishing them around to my heart’s content, that is, until Grandma pivoted the wringer to a position between the two wash tubs and sent the clothes to the second rinse. She poured bluing into that rinse to make the white things look whiter. It reminded me of the blue ink Mother used to fill her fountain pen. Even diluted in the rinse tub, it remained deep blue. I couldn’t figure out how dark blue could make things whiter, but she said it did.

Some things required starch—Niagara starch powder, which she poured out of the dark green box with a picture of Niagara Falls washing down the side. She mixed the powder with boiling water in a small dishpan, and into this she dipped some dresses, aprons, Grandpa’s shirt collars and cuffs, and anything else that needed starching. She wrung those things out by hand so as not to squeeze out all the starch.

As we stood over the rinse tubs, Grandma had time to tell me another story. Years ago, Grandpa and other preachers rotated from one church to another within a given area—”the circuit” they called it. They preached at a different church each week, and wherever they preached, someone from that congregation invited them home for dinner. In those days Sunday dinners were considered the biggest and best meal of the week. The table would be spread with a carefully ironed white table cloth and set with the hostess’s best plates and prettiest serving dishes. The meal usually included several meats, various vegetables, two kinds of potatoes, bread or rolls, several kinds of jellies and jams, sweet pickles, sour pickles, and most likely a mixed pickle relish. In case anyone was still hungry, there were at least three desserts—cake, pie, and canned fruit. Grandma ate until she was stuffed and always wished she could take home some of the abundance to get her through her Monday washing. She made us both hungry by her descriptions, but the work wasn’t finished.

It was now time to carry the first heavy basket full of wet clothes up the narrow outside basement steps to the wash line in the back yard. I usually avoided these steps because they were an easy trap for leaves from the maple trees in the back yard. Earth worms, grubs, and snails hid under the damp, decaying leaves, and I certainly didn’t want to step on anything slimy or sticky. The walls on either side were not much safer than the steps, so rough I had to be careful not to scrape my elbows against them. I took each step gingerly, holding my breath and hoping to make it to the top without encountering a worm, or worse yet a snail. At the top I breathed in again.

Grandma had a pulley wash line like the ones we saw at Amish houses in Pennsylvania. Grandpa put it up for her—two metal wheels around which the line was stretched in a circuit. One wheel was attached to the side of the house and the other to a utility pole just beyond the garden. Grandma stood at one spot and hang up the clothes, pushing the line along as she added to the string of sheets, towels, and shirts. As with most things, Grandma had a right way to hang up the wash. She didn’t just reach into the basket and pull out the first thing her hand encountered. She dug for the sheets first and then the pillowcases and then underwear. She liked order, even on the clothesline. The next cardinal rule was to shake out each garment hard enough to make it SNAP. This helped to get out wrinkles. She fastened the wash on the line with clothespins that were faded to a silvery gray, almost matching her washing machine stick. When she finished, sheets, dresses and towels flapped in the breeze, high above the garden. Once in a while, on a very windy day, the clothes, acting like sails, caused the line to roll on its own and pull a piece of clothing under the wheel. When that happened Grandpa had to get the tall ladder, climb up to the wheel, and work carefully to disengage the garment without tearing it.

Since I couldn’t reach the wash line, Grandma gave me all of Grandpa’s big square white hankies to spread on the grassy bank in front of the row of grape vines where the sun helped to bleach them. I liked how the spread-out hankies bent down the grass blades when they were wet, but as they dried, they become less heavy, and by the time they were completely dry they lay on the very tips. I had to keep an eye on them and gather them before they blew away.

In the afternoon, Grandma brought the basket full of dried clothes in from the line. She would do the ironing the next day, but she sprinkled the clothes with water, so they would be evenly moist and ready to iron. Most things needed ironing—dresses, Grandpa’s shirts, sheets, pillow cases, aprons, table cloths, handkerchiefs, even Grandpa’s pajamas. Underwear and bath towels were the only things we didn’t iron. Upstairs Mother had a bottle with a sprinkler top for dampening our clothes, but Grandma just used her fingers. She put water in a small bowl, spread out a garment on the kitchen table, dipped her fingers into the water and spritzed water all over it. The drops sounded like rain falling on the stiff, air-dried fabric which still smelled like the outside air. She folded each piece over and spritzed again, so both sides would get damp, and then rolled up the piece and stacked it with others on the table. When everything was dampened, she wrapped the pile in a sheet or table cloth and placed the bundle back in the wash basket. Letting everything stand allowed the moisture to spread evenly through each piece.

The next day I watched Grandma iron. Now she could tell stories. I settled in on the daybed under the dining room windows, breathed in the warm, starchy, almost toasty smell of hot ironed cotton and listened.

Some of her “stories” were not really stories, but explanations of how to iron properly—sleeves first, then front and back, collar last of all. To iron cuffs, yokes, and collars it was important to start on the inside of the garment, making sure those inside panels were smooth. Otherwise, the outside wouldn’t get as smooth as it should. You needed to flatten out the fabric and iron slowly, putting more pressure on the back of the iron than the tip for the first go, so that you did not create wrinkles, like Aunt Maggie, who, Grandma said, ironed more wrinkles in than she ironed out. Aunt Maggie was Grandpa’s sister who came from Pennsylvania to visit several times a year. She exceled at nothing in Grandma’s school of housekeeping, but we all loved her anyway.

 Grandma made ironing look easy, but when she gave me the heavy iron to do Grandpa’s handkerchiefs, I struggled not to be like Aunt Maggie. Ironing was harder than it looked. Some day when I was older, I could iron Grandpa’s pajamas, Grandma said. But she wouldn’t let anyone else iron the starched white shirts Grandpa wore to school and church. She didn’t trust anyone else, even Mother, to iron up to her standard. She wanted him to look perfectly groomed, so that people would see that she loved him and took good care of him. Judging by the look of his shirts, she loved him very much.

(Note: I wrote this seven years ago, shortly after the Memorial Day weekend when this event took place. We still lived in Manassas at that time. The new inhabitants of Rosa’s house were close family friends of hers, and by extension had become our friends as well.)

Rosa and I were the only two people for blocks around who hung out up laundry to dry. Our sheets flapped in unison in the unbroken spread of our joined back lawns. But Rosa has been gone for almost eight years, and in truth, the last years of her life her clothes lines drooped unused as she made slow, stooped progress across the back yard to talk with me. She couldn’t garden either, but she still made the rounds poking at plants with her cane as she inspected the flower beds she had created. Sometimes she hired help, sometimes she resigned herself to weeds and overgrown plants.

            I think of Rosa when I hang out laundry, not every time, but often. I wasn’t thinking of her the other Friday, the first day of the Memorial Day weekend. The sun shone in a blue, blue sky. Birds sang everywhere. I paused as I pinned a pillow case to the line to look up at the tall holly tree across the fence that now divides our lawns. It used to be no more than a shrub planted in a triangular bed marking the corner of Rosa’s property. Now it reaches high above me, green against the sky. But there was more than holly growing out from the greenness, and it wasn’t holly berries. About 15 feet above me a large cluster of roses waved in the breeze. My mouth dropped open. I stood transfixed. These were Rosa’s beloved roses, the ones she had tended carefully down on the ground. They had disappeared years ago, died off I supposed, or cut out by Garrett or Amanda, the current owners of “Rosa’s house.” I walked along the recently installed fence to the gate so I could look in to see if roses were blooming below. Nothing. I walked back and looked up. It was as if she were up there, smiling down on me, waving to get my attention. How is it that I had not noticed them before? What was it about this moment that caused me to look up? Could she really be calling to me?

            It felt like the inverse of one of our first interactions. We barely knew each other then. That morning I was high up, leaning out to wash away many years of accumulated grit from my bedroom window. Rosa, three stories below in her flower bed, looked up at me and smiled. “It’s good to see this house loved again,” she had said. Now she was blessing me from above. I was the one on the ground.

            I wanted to go and tell everyone, “Rosa stopped by. She sneaked in when we weren’t looking. She’s still around.” Most of all I wanted to tell Ed, her son. I knew he was probably the only one who would remember the bush. This had to be more than happenstance, coming on Memorial Day weekend, and it wasn’t the iris or lilies from that bed that reappeared, but Rosa’s roses, her signature.

            I didn’t get hold of Ed until Monday morning. He came not knowing what I had to show him, but when I took him back to the corner and pointed up at the still waving roses, I needed no words to explain. He stood there rubbing his goose bumpy arms, as much at loss for words as I had been. Little Ellie from next door spotted “Grandpa Ed” and came running over with Garrett and Amanda behind. We all stood and looked.

            Of course, there is a rational explanation for those roses—the sturdy shoots grew as high as they needed through the dense holly to reach the sunlight. I know about stubborn rose canes, but I choose to believe there is more than this calm, well-reasoned explanation.

In Celtic spirituality there is the belief that certain places or times are experienced as “thin,” meaning that the barriers between our physical world and the world of spirit have thinned out and almost disappeared, so that we catch glimpses or are touched in a palpable way by the inexplicable world beyond our usual senses. Sometimes these glimpses come in the form of something familiar—like roses, for instance. And from someone familiar, like Rosa.

A thin place is not a door wide open showing in the clear light of day what lies beyond. I have no idea “where” Rosa is or how much she “sees” or “knows” about life here in the back yards of Grant Avenue. Does she simply live on in the energy of her pugnacious rose, so much like her own determined, undefeated energy, or does she actually see me as I hang out sheets and pillow cases? What I do know is how like her it is to intuit that I am struggling right now, and also how characteristic it is not to ask what is wrong, but to offer me a smile and some small assurance of her love. That I am not making up. Nor am I making up the way those roses infused my morning, my weekend, and many days beyond with a sense of being loved in all my humanness, all my searching and uncertainty. I continue to feel her smile. I relax into her warmth.

And she brought us all together, something that hasn’t happened in several years. We see each other frequently, but not all together at the same time. Now Wayne and I, Ed, Garrett, Amanda, and even little Ellie stood together for a few minutes, united by the love of the one person who was present only in the red blooms blazing above us. Her love still touches us all, even Ellie whom she never met.

Post Script: To my knowledge, the roses never reappeared.

One of the people I think of on Mother’s Day is Rosa. For twenty-four of the years we lived in Manassas, she was my next-door neighbor. Our backgrounds were very different. She was of French Huguenot ancestry, grew up Methodist, and converted to the Catholicism of her husband. There were political issues on which we differed, and generational differences. She was almost my mother’s age and I could never decide whether she was more a mother or a friend. We shared more together than many neighbors do–she was always more family than casual neighbor both to me and to my family. In all the years we knew each other, I always felt acceptance, respect, and unconditional love from her. I miss her still.

 Since I have been traveling for several weeks, I am only now home again and ready to post this “Mother’s Day” essay—a shortened form of what I wrote for her son soon after her death.

Two summers before Rosa’s death I stood talking with her in her back yard. She said she had hired a lawn service because she had two more summers to live and wanted to enjoy her back yard as long as she was here. I said, “Oh, Rosa, I hope you have more time than that,” and she replied matter-of-factly, “No, I have two more summers, and that is okay.”  She was stooped and had more bad days than good, but, in my denial, I didn’t want even to think about her being gone. I pushed the thought out the back door of my mind and quietly closed the door.

 Twenty-two years earlier we had moved to Manassas, a place where we had no connections. It didn’t take long, though, to meet our next-door neighbors, Butch and Rosa. From the beginning it was if we had known them a long time.

            My first clear memory of Rosa comes shortly after our move. I was leaning out of the upstairs bedroom window to wash the outside, and she called up to me from her flower bed saying that it was good to see the windows sparkling again. This moment marked the beginning of many years of knowing that Rosa was seeing me, not casually observing, but making a place for me in her awareness and in her heart. A few days later she came over to bring us a copy of the local paper that had an article about Wayne and his new job, and she commented that already we had made our house more of a home than any previous owner. How did she know that, I wondered?

Rosa quickly became our go-to person for almost everything—where to find a good hardware store, who would be a good plumber, what nursery had the best plants. She taught me the pronunciation of Catharpin (cat⋅har⋅pin) “so you won’t sound like an outsider,” and she took me to the Benedictine sisters at Linton Hall to get starts of herbs. Whether I needed an egg, an extra garden rake, or a patio table, she willingly shared. If I wanted a particular size of baking pan, she usually gave me a choice among several. One of her favorite sayings was, “I have two of almost everything, and of some things I have three.” Rosa’s loans came with more than the object borrowed. She gave of herself as well. When Grandma lived with us for several months following hip surgery, Rosa not only offered us a wheelchair, but she and Butch came and rolled Grandma across the street to hear Geoffrey read his Arbor Day essay in Nelson Park. When she discovered that Grandma loved to read the news, she and Butch read their papers promptly, and she brought the Washington Post and Richmond Times Dispatch over for Grandma to peruse. These deliveries usually included a short or sometimes longer visit, adding a social contact to Grandma’s day.

Rosa seemed to sense just what help was needed, even when we didn’t ask. Two instances stand out in my mind. Jeremy missed a lot of school in his early years due to undiagnosed allergies. One of those times was the day of a Halloween party at school, and he was inconsolable. I happened to mention it to Rosa that morning on the phone. It was a dreary, drizzly day and when the doorbell rang a few hours later I opened the door to a big black umbrella. Nearly hidden beneath it stood Rosa holding a small flower arrangement which included an orange pumpkin candle. It was for Jeremy, to help make up for his disappointment. Jeremy and I followed the directions and carved a jack o’ lantern face on it before we lit it.

Then there were the tickets. Grandma developed congestive heart failure during her stay with us, and I was coping with oxygen tanks, visiting nurses, round the clock care, and all the other things that go with nursing an elderly person at home. I was worn closer to the breaking point than I knew, but Rosa noticed. One day she phoned asking me to come over because she had a surprise for me. I walked across the yard to her back door and knocked before letting myself in. Rosa leaned against the sink, facing me and began with one of her often-quoted sayings, “Well, you win some and you lose some.”  She put her name into a drawing and won a three-part prize. One part was a tour of houses, (her ongoing mission was to find a house for her son). The other two parts she was giving to Wayne and me—a pair of tickets to a concert at The Barns of Wolf Trap and an overnight stay at an expensive Tyson’s Corner hotel. I was overwhelmed by the gift, but what I remember even more clearly was Rosa’s delight and pleasure in being able to offer it to us. I didn’t realize how much I needed that night away, but Rosa knew.

Rosa was a keen observer, aware of what would catch the interest of two young boys. One morning she called and asked for Geoffrey and Jeremy to come over to see something interesting. It turned out to be a U.S. weather balloon caught in one of her trees. She was always on the lookout for things that might interest us—a book, a magazine article, a TV program to tape for us. It was Rosa who suggested that the boys ought to record Grandma telling stories from her youth. She wanted them to preserve the rich store of memories from their great grandmother. Rosa hired Geoffrey to paint her shed and showed him how to do it. She praised Jeremy for his newspaper deliveries and tipped him generously. I believe that one reason both boys loved Rosa was that she never talked down to them. She treated them like unique individuals who had valuable thoughts and ideas.

One of the commonalities of our friendship was our love of gardening. Working in our respective flower beds often provided the occasion for us to talk together. We traded plants, praised each other’s successes, and consulted about our problem plants. A lover of bargains, she often bought more plants than she could tend and the excess spilled over to me.

Being Rosa’s neighbors meant more than a friendly “hi” across the fence. We exchanged house keys for those times we locked ourselves out and for emergencies when the other was gone. When we left for trips, we knew that our mail would be brought in, our plants watered, the cat, not only fed, but played with. If it rained hard the basement would be checked for water  When we returned Rosa almost always commented that it was good to see lights on in our house again. Her name appeared on both boys’ school forms as the emergency contact. She instructed her snow removal person to clear a path between our two houses because we needed to be able to reach each other. In the summer we enjoyed the wide expanse of our adjoining yards which we both agreed to keep open between us, giving the sense of a park-like space.

Rosa knew more than her share of loss and grief. She and Butch had three sons. The oldest died of leukemia at age twenty-one, years before I knew her. She spoke of him from time to time, sometimes with a catch in her voice, but often with enjoyment, telling me about his interests and abilities. For many of the years I knew her, she was worrying over her youngest son who suffered from severe, uncontrollable diabetes that eventually claimed his life. At his funeral I was touched by how little and old and tired she looked, but she determinedly went on, refusing to give in to despair or self pity. She talked freely to me about her sons, but never once did I hear her complain about the unfairness of losing two of them so early. She worried about Butch, getting teary more than once in concern for his health and the grief he carried for his lost sons.

Rosa continued to embrace life. During her last summer our night blooming cereus* had multiple buds and one night three of them opened. It was about 10 p.m. but lights were on next door so I called to see if Rosa wanted to come over to see them. She did. Wayne walked across our driveways to help her navigated her way, and when she had made it up our six porch steps, she sank gratefully into a chair. Together we admired the amazingly complex flowers. I expected that she would want to stay ten minutes or so, but she sat there for most of an hour simply enjoying the flowers, asking questions about them, and observing details—like a child in her wonder and enjoyment of their beauty. 

During that year we watched her become more and more stooped. She came out less often, but still in the summer evenings I would look over and see her slowly moving about the yard. She gloried in the basket of pink petunias given her by a nurseryman she had patronized over the years and talked repeatedly about the youth from her church who came to help for a day, filling her back yard with energy and laughter. When she felt up to it, she worked at cleaning out closets, tool sheds, and cupboards, sometimes calling me across the back yard, to come and see what she found, or to offer me something. Large hematomas developed on her arms. She looked like a shelf brace—the upper half of her body bent almost perpendicular to her legs. Clearly life was more and more difficult and she was preparing to leave. 

Just before our summer vacation Rosa was diagnosed with leukemia and hospitalized. We all knew her frail body could not take much more. I visited her in the hospital just days before we left. She was in pain and not comfortable in her bed, but her first comment to me was not about herself. Instead, she asked, “Well, has the baby come yet?” referring to my soon-to-be-born granddaughter. Talking was hard so I tried to do most of it. I told her how much I loved her and valued our friendship. She talked about this not being the way she imagined she would go—leukemia was the newcomer to her already ample list of health problems, but that she was ready to go. She spoke of her concern for Butch. I positioned a pillow for her and kissed her goodbye, knowing I might never see her again. I didn’t. We had e-mails from her son while we were gone, keeping us informed of her decline. She died just as our returning plane touched down at Dulles. 

I stood at the funeral home looking at Rosa’s worn out, well lived-in body and remembered her often-repeated saying, “You win some and you lose some.” I thought to myself, “Well, Rosa, you won this one.”  You are out of pain. You are free. But we will miss you here.

*Night blooming cereus, as their name suggests, bloom at night, for one night only. By morning they hang limp and shrunken. Hence the need to see them during the short time they are open.

A good friend and member of my writing group, Saloma Furlong, has just posted a short interview with me on her website. She poses a number of questions about my writing process, how I look at it and how I experienced it. Check it out here, if you are interested.

We are offering a drawing for the chance to win a free copy of The Blistering Morning Mist, so if you don’t already have a copy, here is your chance to try for a free one.

Saloma and I first met at a writing conference almost five years ago. At that point we lived quite far apart, she in New England and me in Northern Virginia. When Wayne and I moved to Harrisonburg later that year, I was surprised to see Saloma at the Farmer’s Market. Was she visiting the area again? I gathered up my courage to approach this established author, and sure enough, she had been eyeing me too, thinking I looked familiar.

She was not visiting. She and her husband had also just moved here, and thus began our friendship, two people new to the community, looking for connections. We discovered quickly that we had much in common in addition to writing–gardening, baking, reading, traveling. We were both looking for a group to support us in our individual writing projects, so we decided to begin meeting together. Now it seems hard to imagine that we haven’t known each other forever. How wrong one of my former clients was, who declared that one can’t make new friends after they turn fifty!

You can read here about her two already-published books and the one that is currently in process.

I’ve just recently talked with my Aunt Dot by phone. She is the remaining member of my mother’s family and is now past her mid-nineties and heading toward one hundred. My mind went back to something I wrote the year she turned ninety, when as many family members as possible gathered to celebrate with her. By Sunday morning, some had begun to disburse, but a number of us went to church together. Afterwards I write this.

The next day:

Here we sit on two rows on a Sunday morning in a Mennonite Mecca. Who knows what important personages have sat in these benches before us, and on what auspicious occasions? What significant events have transpired in this room? I picture Grandpa sitting here in his plain suit along with other “brethren.” Our non-traditional assortment of “Lehmans” is not what Grandpa or H. S. Bender would have thought of as “the future of the Mennonite Church.” Yet, here we are, singing together in the best Mennonite tradition—pony-tailed Ron, smokey breathed Bob, short-haired Judith, Kathie with earrings dangling, Jackson sporting a new jacket bought for the occasion but not singing because he doesn’t know the songs or the words. Behind me is Pink Menno Grandma Ruby beside gay Doug. Next to me I hear the beautiful, to die for, bass voice of Jewish Nathaniel singing “To God be the glory,” deep and note perfect . . .“through Jesus the son . . .” (He sings professionally in a church every Sunday so this language isn’t exactly new to him.) On the other side are the familiar tenor voices of Wayne and Doug, not quite as professional, but equally beautiful in their familiarity. My Mennonite soul settles back into the richness of the sound, even as my mind is busy translating the words into a theology I can endorse. I imagine that with Nathaniel and Doug nearby the translation wires are hot and humming, probably sparking.

What does it mean to each of us to be here, to be singing these songs, these words together on a Sunday morning? Maybe some are like Wayne who gives his full attention to the music, letting the words flow by, mere carriers for the musical notes. For how many do these words express the indisputable truths they were to Grandpa and his generation?

We are here to honor Aunt Dot. On that we all agree. We have gathered to celebrate her 90^th birthday and all of her children and assorted family members have accompanied her to church this morning along with some stragglers—Wayne and me, Aunt Ruby, Doug and Judy. It is more than Aunt Dot though, and more than family togetherness that makes this a good occasion for me. I sense that people are entering the experience for its own sake, even as translation happens. I look up at the round ceiling high above me. The space is full of light and airiness. I feel the goodness of what is expressed in the 23^rd Psalm that even Nathaniel, along with Max, and Cora need not translate into meaningfulness. What is it that touches us, that makes us richer for being here?

While there is familial commonality in our past, the differences are vast—Bob who grew up Amish on an Indiana farm, Ted who lives in metropolitan D.C., Max who just spent the summer in a heady mix of a cosmopolitan  New York City music culture, Margaret who grew up in the Congo, high school senior Nathaniel who went to Israel for his Bar Mitzvah, Jackson whose parents aren’t married and thus divides his life between two households, Doug who travels the earth for the World Bank because the Mennonite institution for which he used to work cannot tolerate his gayness, me who helped break the men’s only club of ordained persons in Virginia Conference, Judy who chose not to collect the typical Lehman collection of initials behind her name and spends her days baking bread. Collectively we could use a whole box of pins to mark the spots of the world where we have lived. Few of us still live in identifiable Mennonite communities and none of us would be recognized as Mennonites on the street.

Some would say that most of us have strayed from our heritage, perhaps even lost it, but to me that we can live together and enjoy each other’s differences feels a much richer heritage. We no longer need to live with the disapproval and suspicion of any deviation from “the one true way” that saturated Grandpa and Grandma’s culture and Aunt Dot’s early life. That is what I celebrate this morning—the joy of being together without the lines and squares that kept everyone in their place in the past. I imagine we all are searching for a God that is larger than the one our tradition has handed us. Perhaps sitting here in our diversity we touch a bit of that great Goodness for which we all long. We are part of something more expansive, much more filled with grace than we know. Those before us helped plant those seeds deep within us. If they were here now, I hope that they would be able to celebrate with us and to rejoice in the freedom we have found.

Many mornings I watched Aunt Esther dress. Her bedroom was across the hall from our upstairs living room. I’d go and sit on her bed waiting for her to come from the bathroom in her housecoat. Her dressing ritual was unvarying. She always began with her girdle, the literal foundation of her clothing. It held her within the confines she allowed herself, and like a machine designed by Dr. Seuss it did almost everything—cupped her generous breasts, bolstered her midsection, and fastened the tops of her long, dark nylon hose. She had to tug the girdle into place, edging the zipper up as she enclosed her soft body within its stays. Once done, she stood straight and firm.

To put on her nylon hose, she sat on her bed beside me, and gave this process meticulous attention. First, she balled her right hand into a fist and ran it to the toe of one stocking. Then, spreading her fingers, she slowly pulled her hand back out, turning it first one way and then the other to make sure there were no runners in it. Wearing a stocking with a runner was like having spinach stuck in her teeth. All day people would have whispered to her, “Do you know you have a runner,” and if she discovered one later in the day, she would have wondered who had noticed the run but had been too polite to point it out. When she was assured that the stocking was in good condition, she put it on, carefully pulling it up to make sure the seam in the back ran straight up the middle of her leg. If it tended to one side she started over, using both hands to center it. A crooked seam was as much a problem as a runner and a call for more furtive whispers or chagrinned speculations about who had noticed.

Next came her slip, as much required as a girdle, to cover her undergarments and provide more body to the skirt of her dress. Then it was time to comb her hair. She sat down on her little blue-upholstered vanity stool and unbraided her nighttime pigtail. She brushed her nearly waist-length hair, parted it carefully and pulled it back tightly, twisting it into a bun at the back of her neck. She bent her head so the bun will stay in place while she cupped a thick hairnet on the fingers of both hands and deftly fit it over the bun anchoring the whole arrangement with sturdy hair pins. She pulled her hair so tight I was sure it must hurt her, and bobby pinned in place the little curly tendrils that escaped her bun.

When every hair was tightly secured, she applied deodorant from a roll-on bottle and dusted herself generously from the pink tin of Cashmere Bouquet powder—under her arms, the outsides of her arms, down between her breasts. She created a shower of powder whose weekly accumulation I would dust up and shake from her dresser scarf on Saturday morning for the princely sum of five cents. Her second line of defense against perspiration was dress shields, a pair of half circle pads and straps that fit under her arms to protect the underarm area of her dress from getting soiled when she sweated.

Finally, it was time to put on her dress, a two-part process. She pulled the plain, long-sleeved dress over her head. Then came her cape, actually considered part of the dress, but separate. It was made of the same fabric as the dress and had a front and back that came to her waist with a belt that snapped at her side. Neither dress nor cape had a collar. A well-made cape fit smoothly over the dress, so that it would be hard at a first glance to notice it as a separate piece. She pinned down any hairs brushed out of place in the dressing process, combing them back into submission and finally put on her white net covering. It too fit exactly and covered most of her hair.

I felt satisfaction as I watched Aunt Esther. Everything fit exactly—straight lines and full, rounded curves, over her rounded body, so different from my own skinny, boney arms and legs. Each piece settled securely into place. It gave me a sense of contentment, rightness, and order. Although she was precise in dressing and combing, she was not able to contain her buoyant spirit.  It spilled out as she “whistled” her way down the stairs, the word whistling in quotes because she never learned to whistle. Instead, she blew air out her mouth in a toneless “wheeo, wheeo, wheeo.” She was ready for a new day.

Note: From a chapter that didn’t make it into The Blistering Morning Mist. I describe a ritual I observed during the years we lived at Grandpa and Grandma’s house in our second-floor apartment. Aunt Esther was teaching at Eastern Mennonite College during that time.

Those of you who have read The Blistering Morning Mist might remember the story about my mother’s paper dolls, the ones I didn’t want to be divided. They still exist, undivided, after almost 100 years. The other day I was searching for something in a storage box of her things and came across them.

Glancing quickly through them, I was amused by how different her paper dolls were from the world she lived in. She was surrounded by women wearing subdued cape dresses and men in dark plain suits. Her clothes had no lace or frills, and her hair was straight and uncut.

Not so with her paper dolls, cut from Sears and Roebuck catalogs, which of course didn’t conform to Mennonite dress codes. There were more dresses than I photographed, among them a preponderance of fur-collared coats.

My mother’s interest must have shown up early. At the bottom of the box was this typewriter. She spent many years of her life at typewriters, writing long, interesting letters, typing term papers for others, and teaching typing to hundreds of high school students, including me.

I wanted to ask my mother all kinds of questions as I looked at the dolls and their clothes. Who were the members of her paper doll family? Did she wish she could dress like they did as she chose their clothes and cut them out? What was the pretend world she created for them? Does she remember how upset I got over dividing them? If so, what was going on in her mind as she put them away? None of those questions can be answered now, so I’ll continue to guess and to wonder.

There is an image that comes to me when I am struggling, a way of picturing myself. I also used it with clients sometimes to help them picture how they were feeling about a task or a skill.

Imagine a sturdy wooden beam stretching across a distance, a beam that is holding you up. It could be in a barn or under a bridge, a tree branch or even a high balance beam. You know it can bear your weight—of that you are confident. But what does “holding you up” mean? If you are holding on by your hands or finger tips, it is holding you, bearing your weight. It won’t break. It may take a lot of work to hold on, but you have to acknowledge that you are “on it.”

Now imagine yourself sitting on the beam or branch. Again, it is holding you. It is strong enough. But what a different experience. You are comfortable, at least as comfortable as one can be sitting on a beam!

Being on the beam can happen in many different ways. A simple example. You can have a grade average of 93.6% which would round up to 94, an A grade for which you worked hard and feel lucky to get. Or your average may be 100%, something you didn’t really work that hard for. Either way your grade will be an A, but the dymanics behind it are experienced differently.

This past year I have thought of that image repeatedly as I’ve faced new challenges. In the spring I agreed to chair the Worship Commission at church, the group that plans worship services. I’ve led worship in various churches many times. I have seminary training. It sounded like a fit. However, much was new about it, and it came with details no one had thought to tell me about ahead of time. In addition, COVID called for continuous adaptations that were new for us all. Because of other committee members’ schedules, I ended up being the one who needed to find individuals to fill multiple slots for each worship service. This process was made even trickier as people’s schedules filled up over the holidays. To paraphrase my friend Evie, I sometimes felt like I was doing research to find out who wouldn’t be at church on a given Sunday. I had some lists to help me come up with possibilities, but all of them incomplete. Being relatively new to the congregation, I still didn’t know a lot of people nor did I know their gifts. I was hanging on by my fingertips.

Beam number two was editing a bi-monthly newsletter for a community organization. Not a big job—right? Although I’ve never edited anything but my own work and that of writing group friends, I often threaten to bring out my red pen when I read poor writing.

I’d been a member of this organization for several years but had paid little attention to it and attended few of its meeting. Suddenly, I needed to know a lot more. I met with the previous editor and others with whom I would work. I had major help with the first two issues, both of which fell due when I was out of town or particularly busy with other things. The third issue had complications of its own. With good help from others, we got it out, but I felt frazzled and completely incompetent, hanging on by my fingertips.

Weaving through both of these were tasks around The Blistering Morning Mist, my memoir that came out in August. I wanted to plan for some publicity events and to figure out some ways to let people know about the book. Putting myself forward and asking favors of others don’t come easily to me. This was a completely new frontier, again made more challenging by COVID. For weeks at a time, I didn’t even hold on by my fingertips. I simply let go, only to have to take hold again.

A new year has begun and life feels different. I took off the entire week between Christmas and New Year and wouldn’t let myself do any work on any of these three. Then this past Monday I sat down and plotted my course for the next while. I feel almost like a different person. Of course, one day or one week off didn’t transform everything. Changes started earlier through the gracious stepping in of several others to help lighten the load—one person to help fill worship slots, another person to be associate editor of the newsletter. I have more experience. I’ve made a newsletter schedule for the year. I am starting to have ideas for worship rather than just scrambling to know “how things are usually done.”

Somehow, without my really recognizing it, the mad scramble of the fall has pulled me, or enable me to climb up on the beam. I am sitting, not hanging on for dear life. I’m under no illusion that I’ll feel confident every minute or that I can’t revert to a finger-grip again in the face of a deadline, but I also know I can sit at least some of the time. For that I give thanks.

What are your experiences of holding on and sitting?

This is a season of the year crammed full of ritual—not just the churchy kind, although there is plenty of that, but many other customs and tradition that we perform faithfully and in the same way year after year. The little word the is often an indicator. We put up, not a tree, but the tree, we put up the lights, we roast the Christmas turkey or ham. These activities may not completely fulfill the definition of ritual, but they come close for many of us. The sigh of satisfaction when the tasks are completed, the need to sit and take in the result, the sense of goodness or joy. These acts transform ordinary time into something more.

Thinking about all of this, I was reminded of another ritual I have participated in for years, not only at Christmas, but throughout the year. It is one I miss since moving to Harrisonburg. Here is what I wrote about it in November of 2015:  

Not everything was in order when I walked into Panera for my monthly breakfast with Linnea. “Our table” beside the gas fireplace was already taken, and there was no fire burning on this frosty morning. I know the table isn’t ours, but we sit there so regularly it feels like it ought to be waiting for us as part of our monthly ritual. Linnea wasn’t there yet, but I saw Jim in his usual spot and nodded to him. After ordering my food I asked if the fire could be lit and put down my note book and coat at another table nearby. While I was filling my coffee cup Linnea arrived.

We have been getting together for years, not always here, but nearly always over food. Although we see each other at various times and places in addition, these monthly meals have become a sustaining ritual in our lives.

We attended seminary together, almost 30 years ago. I don’t remember meeting her, just that she was one of the class, one of the many people I didn’t know in a strange setting. At first we weren’t particularly close friends. We came from different backgrounds and had different professional experiences, but we were both married which meant we didn’t live in the dorm. We disappeared after classes, going home to husbands and children. We became part of an eclectic assortment of women trying to maintain a precarious balance between home and school, and that commonality drew us together.

After seminary we each went our separate ways, but we both lived in Northern Virginia and somewhere in that intricate web of interrelations, we found each other again. I invited her to join a clergy women’s group I was part of. Then there were clergy women lunches that slowly worked down to being just her and me. Those lunches shifted to breakfasts and have become a solid support in my life. While our regularity is spotty due to busy schedules, our meetings have seen us through job changes, challenges, and retirement; the marriages of children and then the divorces that ended some of those marriages; the births of grandchildren; the ups and downs of children’s careers, their health concerns; the deaths of friends or their spouses. We have weathered presidential elections and ecclesiastical earth quakes, reported on travels and recommended books to each other. We haven’t shared recipes or shopping bargains or sermon notes, although I have done presentations for groups at Linnea’s church, and she has referred clients to me.

Our times together have the feeling of carefully choreographed ritual. I, who live nearby, usually arrive first and order my coffee and pastry. Then Linnea comes rushing in with her commuter traffic report. She orders cappuccino and we set down at our table by the fire. We talk. At the end Linnea—it is almost always Linnea, says, “Well, I hate to say this but I’ve got to go.” We set a date for our next breakfast, hug each other, and go our separate ways, always refreshed.

The dictionary defines ritual as “a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and performed according to set sequence.” That describes our breakfasts. It explains my sense that all is not well when “our table” isn’t available.

But ritual doesn’t depend just on place. It is also the gestures, words, and objects—our greeting and farewell, our conversation, and the food we eat. I see it as a holy time, even though we often laugh, and talk sometimes about trivial things. We may even be irreverent.

Ritual has transformative power. For Linnea and me our breakfasts have transformed a casual acquaintance into strong friendship. It has deepened our lives, and proven itself a safe haven for trying out ideas and talking about personal concerns

Ritual practices convey or embody a reality or truth that is otherwise difficult to put into words. It becomes a container for something much larger than those who participate. I know we feel that as we patiently, month after month, make our way through the obstacle course of our calendars to find a next meeting time. We don’t need to put into words its importance. That we make time for it is indication enough.

Back to the present—2021, a chilly November morning, this time at a Starbucks in Haymarket, the most convenient place for us to meet. Little has changed except that we arrive in the parking lot at the same time and walk in together, putting on our masks almost in unison. No fire to sit near, in fact a rather drab interior, but we pay little attention to it. We are together and have catching up to do. We’ve seen each other a few times since my move, but this had been the long Covid stretch. Our meeting feels past due.

We catch each other up on family and personal events, and talk about mutual friends. Then we brainstorm together about a project I’m working on, Linnea as enthusiastic as I, even though it’s my project. It feels like we had never been apart. As usual, Linnea looks at her watch and says, “I really hate to say this, but I’ve got to go.” Not quite a benediction or blessing, but it holds within it the blessing of promise. We have just figured out when we can meet again. We put on our masks (a new part of the ritual), hug, and say goodbye, and I drive off for the rest of my day, feeling lighter than when I came. Once again, our ritual has enriched and energized me.

What are rituals that sustain your life?

I posted this on my book webpage, hoping that it would trigger an announcement to you all that I’d posted something new, but it didn’t, so here is the good news, at least if you were thinking of giving The Blistering Morning Mist as a gift to all your friends!

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