Looking back

Seven years ago, in 2019, I wrote my first memoir. One of my goals was to discover the source of my father’s anger, often directed to me. I had a mostly happy childhood because of close ties with my extended family. Yet, over a dozen pages in Mennonite Daughter: The Story of a Plain Girl describe, discuss, and analyze my dad’s heavy-handed treatment of me as the oldest daughter living in the Longenecker household. My memoir closes with an acceptance of his positive influence in my life, noting his contributions to my personality and character, determination and courage, among them. An acceptance that felt somewhat tentative at the time, but real.

These traits I see in the profile of my dad here, intent on sharpening farmers’ knives in one corner of the shop near a window. Farmers regularly needed the dull edges of their scythes, plow shares and mower blades sharpened, so they would cut more efficiently with a clean edge in the field. My dad was the fixer!

In the snapshot below, Daddy is breaking in a newly purchased Minneapolis Moline tractor, an iconic American farm machine, known for its distinctive “Prairie Gold” color and red and gold logo. It was likely manufactured in Hopkins, Minnesota. I imagine that the M.M. company loaded the tractor onto a freight train and shipped it to Rheems, PA, where the train stopped long enough for my dad to unload it. I remember Daddy talking about “waiting for the train to stop” in the village of Rheems, PA.

Its price tag still dangles from the tractor grill. “Who will buy it?” he must wonder.

In these snapshots and movie that follows, I observe his focus and intention needed to work the machine—along with courage to continue pursuing tractor sales and farm equipment repair in the face of challenges of running a business without his father’s help. All at the close of World War II.

In the video he is wearing a puffy denim work hat with a long bill. It looks almost like the hat of a train engineer. Here he is testing out the new tractor–switching the gears from forward to reverse and back again. When the video moves to the shop’s interior, he is sharpening a farmer’s knife.

My daddy was only 31 years old when his father, the founder of H. R. Longenecker and Son, died. The partnership of father and son, Henry and Ray, that was to have lasted much longer, ended when my grandfather Henry died suddenly of a stroke. In time, my dad Ray expanded the shop located in Rheems, Pennsylvania, and added a large farm equipment repair space with concrete floors, equipped with embedded copper heating pipes that unfortunately failed to transmit enough warmth from feet to body during cold Pennsylvania winters.

Credits:

Video courtesy of Aunt Ruthie Longenecker’s 16 millimeter movie camera, 1950s. Artist Cliff Beaman customized this 30-second clip and music from a much longer video.

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What I Know Now

For me, the years have distilled into worthy lessons learned. Looking back through the long lens of time, my father’s life lessons appear larger than his shortcomings to me now as I recollect my early years. I don’t minimize the pain.  However, indignation concerning his mistreatment of me has become much less harsh, an amalgam of bitter and sweet, like the cocoa drink Barbara Crooker uses as a metaphor in her poem “Not a Spoon, a Key,” quoted in Bedside Prayers, ed. June Cotner, 1997.

Not a Spoon, a Key

We open memories

like Hershey’s cocoa—

the lid sticks tight.

 

We think the past

has happened,

is fixed as a photograph

locked in an album,

but it changes, it develops,

mixed with time,

like sugar mixes in

the dark and bitter powder,

making a drink

that warms and restores.

~ Barbara Crooker, poet

News Flash! The computer on which I’ve written hundreds of blog posts and typed the manuscript for both my books has been replaced. After nearly 12 years (gasp!) of steady service, a special Christmas gift for me included a new computer.

You would agree, dear friend: It was time, it was high time!