A personal crisis pitched me back to the home I’d left twenty-five years earlier.
Let’s say your husband of fifteen years leaves you for a guy named Bob, and then six days later a tipsy youth totals your car. Let’s say that you are suddenly left with a hefty lake house mortgage and you can no longer afford the research trip you’ve planned. Here are your options: 1) you can sit around with a melancholy view of a frozen lake, feeling sorry for yourself; 2) you can visit supportive girlfriends who make you feel even sorrier for yourself; or 3) you can go back to the Mennonite community that you left twenty-five years ago. You’re still feeling sorry for yourself, but now at least all the food is made with real butter.
At age 43, when I had recuperated enough to travel to California, I moved in with my Mennonite mom and dad for four months. Did my mother drink tuna juice out of a can? Certainly. Did my father reprimand me for discarding a toothpick he’d planned to use until his death many years hence? By all means! I could have rented a car and forayed out on my own, but I preferred to trail my folks to grandkids’ recitals, church events, and meetings of the Mennonite Senior Professionals. On one occasion I accompanied a bus full of oldsters on Agrarian History Day. Naturally these activities forced me to post many emails to my friend Carla back in Michigan. “Check it out, my mom just offered me some scrofulous buttermilk four months past the expiration date!” Carla, who teaches creative writing, advised me to drink the buttermilk. “Live dangerously!” she said. “And write that shit down!”
I told my mom that I was going to try my hand at writing a book about coming back to the Mennonite community. Cheery and unflappable, my mother suggested that I set up shop in the backyard gazebo, a white lattice structure under a thick veil of honeysuckle and jasmine. A slow fan pushed the heat around, and the rose garden was so still I could hear the drowsy hum of bees.
Every morning I took my cue from my mother, who has always glorified her lord and savior by rising at 6:00 a.m. sharp. There’s a retirement village across from my parents’ house, and behind the village, a local college track. Here I would run in the hot bright sun. Every step, every mile, seemed to float me further from my life in Michigan. Sometimes I heard the cry of peafowl from a nearby estate, and this sound filled me with an indescribable joy. It made me want to run forever, and I seemed to hover suspended above that perfect track. At the end of my six miles I always knew exactly what I needed to write that day.
