Moments of Extreme Emotion: A Broken Leg & Ecstasy Expressed
Moment of Exasperation One of the mysteries of life is how things happen at our house. Specifically, how did the leg on this piano bench break? We still haven't figured out the answer for sure though we have speculated on some possible explanations. How did this...
The Good Ole Summertime & the Simple Life
"In the Good Old Summer Time" shares nostalgic space with another old, familiar tune of the season: "Summer time and the livin' is easy." Summertime for the Longenecker family may not have been...
Home-grown Miracles: See, Taste, Touch
e EGG Reader, in your hand you hold A silver case, a box of gold. I have no door, however small, Unless you pierce my tender wall, And there's no skill in healing then Shall ever make me whole again. Show pity, Reader, for my plight: Let be, or else consume me...
Two Vignettes: Mom’s Green Stamps & E-town’s Rexall Drug Store
“Mare – yun,” my mother calls (yells, actually), “It’s time to lick the green stamps again. The books are on top of the kitchen table.” Mom likes to interrupt my reading. To me time with my books is serious business but to her it's play. Not working. Wasting time with...
Kathy Pooler and Independence Day: Her Story of Freedom
This July, my friend and author Kathy Pooler will be celebrating Independence Day in a big way launching her memoir in early July. The book's title Ever Faithful to His Lead: My Journey Away from Emotional Abuse hints at the road Kathy has traveled from victim to...
Two Mennonite Nonagenarians: Mother Ruth & Aunt Cecilia
Here is my mother's family of four brothers and one sister in a farm meadow in the 1940s. They are children of Abram Hernley Metzler and Sadie Landis Metzler, a Mennonite family of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Standing in birth order are her brothers Landis, Leroy,...
Where the Magic Happens
I am happy to introduce a new writer to these pages, Mary Gottschalk. Actually you have already visited Mary's website if you read my recent post on her blog Flying the Coop: Leaving Mennonite Land. But though she is new to my blog, Mary is certainly not a new author,...
Purple Passages and a Laugh: May 2014 Edition
Miracles & Problems Uncertainty & Faith The opposite of doubt is not faith. It's certainty. Faith based on certainty is no faith at all. Anne Lamott Embrace the present. Uncertainty is no excuse for paralysis. Do not wait for good to happen for...
A Dozen Daughters: My Mother’s Other Family
This is the family I grew up in: my parents Ray and Ruth with my two sisters and one brother. But after I left home and eventually married, my parents had more children. No, my mother was not a modern-day Sarah. She didn’t have babies in old age. But in their early...
Fancy Dress Finds Plain Girl
It’s spring concert time and I’m making my fingers fly fast over the strings of my violin pizzicato style, trying to keep up with the syncopated rhythms of The Typewriter Song. Noah Klauss, the director of our Elizabethtown High School Orchestra, is a fan of Leroy...
Secrets of My Report Card & Other Tall Tales
My mother saved all my report cards. When I retrieved them from the attic, only grade 8 was missing. They are tall documents, sheathed in a coarse, brown envelope. And they speak for me as a student: mostly A's with a smattering of Bs. Once I got a C- on a history...
7 Things I Do that Remind Me of Home
Over forty years ago I left Lancaster county and my Mennonite life. Though I have visited dozens of times since then, Jacksonville, Florida, has been my home. Nonetheless, every single day I notice myself repeating rituals that reveal the imprint of my early training....
Fighting Spirit: Rhetoric, Rotten Rulers, and a Sex Strike
Is a family graduation on your calendar this year? As a faculty member at Florida State College at Jacksonville (then Florida Community College), I attended graduation every year in full regalia with hundreds of ecstatic grads, joyful families, and proud faculty and...
Happy Birthday, Will!
News Flash! To mark Shakespeare’s 450th birthday, “the Royal Shakespeare Company is spearheading a three year Jubilee, between 2014 and 2016, that will involve theatre performances, events and live streaming cinema around the world.” * * * * * It’s April 23 in my...
Picture this!
Mennonite Flashback III: Rabbits and Rings
This is a sequel to a previous blog post: Flying the Coop: Leaving Mennonite Land with a link to my original story on Mary Gottschalk's website. His Story: I proposed to Marian my Mennonite girl friend one snowy evening, my car stuck in a snow-bank. When she accepted...
Purple Passages: A Dragon with a Gift, April 2014
LILACS April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots and spring rain. T. S. Eliot The Waste-Land When Lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in...
Disappearing Images: 7 Items Missing in Mom’s Bedroom
Mother Longenecker still lives in the same house she and Daddy bought soon after they got married in 1940. Their bedroom looked the same for decades, but it's changed over the years. Here's what is missing . . . and what I remember from so long ago. 1. The Art Deco...