by MarianBeaman | Apr 19, 2017 | blog, Family / Nostalgia, Mennonite History, Mennonite Lore, Nostalgia, Quotations, Uncategorized
Crimson Album, a Golden Treasure Underneath a stack of stuff in one of the bedrooms my sisters and I sorted through, a red album appeared. It was really not very crimson, but more magenta in hue. To whom did it belong? What was inside? Behold! A scrapbook album my...
by MarianBeaman | Apr 12, 2017 | blog, Cliff Beaman artist, Easter, Family / Nostalgia, Memory, Mennonite History, Mennonite Lore, Nostalgia, Quotations, Uncategorized
Easter Greetings: The Sacred, the Secular, and the Natural Many other postcards have been posted on this website since my sisters and I have been sorting through the house Aunt Ruthie shared with my Grandma Fannie. You can visit them here and here. This season I share...
by MarianBeaman | Apr 5, 2017 | blog, Family / Nostalgia, Memory, Mennonite History, Mennonite Lore, Nostalgia, Uncategorized
This postcard was sent to Miss Fannie Martin (my Grandma Longenecker) from Mount Joy, Pennsylvania. The postmark, dated October 15, 1909, is intact but the stamp has been cut out, deleting some of the text that would illuminate the meaning of the scene. Your mission,...
by MarianBeaman | Mar 29, 2017 | blog, Family / Nostalgia, Mennonite History, Mennonite Lore, Nostalgia, Quotations, Uncategorized
A True Story Hilda lived in Pennsylvania. She had lots of friends in her hometown. Then she moved to Maine. When she left she took with her something special. This post will tell you what and how and why. Hilda Zeager loved Lancaster County farmland where she...
by MarianBeaman | Mar 22, 2017 | blog, Literature, Quotations, Reflection, Uncategorized
Balance is a good thing unless you are sitting on a see-saw and want to get off! Vernal Equinox On Monday, March 20, both day and night were about the same length around the globe. People in the northern hemisphere experienced the spring equinox. Those in the...
by MarianBeaman | Mar 14, 2017 | blog, meditation, Mennonite History, Mennonite Lore, Nostalgia, popular culture, Quilt, Quotations, Uncategorized
How to Make an American Quilt, the Movie Women stitch quilt as a wedding gift for girl Girl doesn’t know whether she wants to get married. Women in quilting circle tell stories about life and love that fit the quilt’s theme Where Love Resides Wrapped in a quilt,...
by MarianBeaman | Mar 7, 2017 | blog, book review, Family / Nostalgia, Memory, Mennonite Lore, Uncategorized
Her Story The title for Rhoda Janzen’s latest memoir, Mennonite Meets Mr. Right, could be recast as Egg-Head Mennonite Intellectual Meets Pentecostal Hunk Mitch. I succumbed easily to her comic style, which engaged me while reading her first memoir, Mennonite in a...
by MarianBeaman | Feb 28, 2017 | blog, Family / Nostalgia, meditation, Mennonite History, Mennonite Lore, Nostalgia, Uncategorized
It’s a safe bet that I’d find clothes in your closet, boots, maybe a tennis racket. But I don’t think I’d find an otter hat, a movie camera, a stack of paintings or a ruffle iron. Sorting through ninety years of accumulation, my sisters and I have found all that ~ and...
by MarianBeaman | Feb 22, 2017 | blog, Family / Nostalgia, Memory, Mennonite History, Nostalgia, Quotations, Uncategorized
Five journals, spiral-bound, sit in my writing studio. Their pages, bowed from cargo storage on flights from Florida to Pennsylvania, contain snatches of conversation from the last nine years of Aunt Ruthie’s life. Since 2008, she has had to cope with a pacemaker...
by MarianBeaman | Feb 14, 2017 | blog, Memory, Quotations, Travel, Uncategorized
Love Locks Their love, they thought, was an iron-clad statement, fixed to the grill work of Pont des Arts bridge in Paris. Etched with their initials, couples professed undying love as they tossed the key to their lovelock into the Seine. City workers in 2015 with a...
