Then back in the gazebo I wrote in a dreamy haze until Mom suddenly appeared aproned in front of me. “Come inside for lunch,” she’d say. “I made Rollkuchen.” In the afternoons I heard my father rustling among the cherry trees. He would approach in his dress socks and shorts, holding a handful of cherries. These he would set down beside my computer and go away again without saying anything.
I suppose you could say that in writing a memoir I risked something new and so reinvented myself. But the real reinvention was looking at my parents, and seeing who I wanted to become.
Rhoda Janzen's memoir, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, has just been published.
