Winterberries and Apple Blossoms: Reflections and Flavors of a Mennonite Year by Nan Forler illustrated with paintings by Peter Etril Snyder (Tundra Books, 2011) takes the reader month by month through a calendar year in an Old Order Mennonite girl’s life. Old Order Mennonites are a religious community that live in and around the Waterloo region in southern Ontario. Similar to the Amish, they live simple lives with very few modern conveniences. They do not own cars nor computers or televisions. They work on farms, making their living on what they grow and sell.
Naomi is the young girl from whose perspective the reader views her world. Each month is written about in poems. For example, January opens with a poem called “The Quilting Bee.”
Matilda Martin and Edna Bauman
Mam and Lucinda and me –
my first time quilting with the women.
Noisy greetings as we settle in around the quilt frame,
then silence as each begins.
A lovely painting of Naomi stitching amongst the women is depicted on the facing page. And so the months go, poem by poem, Naomi’s life unfolding before the reader. A Mennonite girl’s life is clearly different from a boy’s — in May’s poem “The Bicycle” for example, we see Naomi covertly attempting to ride her brother’s bike and suffering for it (she crashes, her skirt getting caught in the greasy chains) but two months later in “The Ball Game” we see Naomi whack the baseball well past the older boy’s reach even though they had moved in field expecting her to be a weak hitter.
I liked the pacing in this book. The poems are slow and thoughtful like the kind of lives these children live in their pastoral farm communities. And the paintings that depict the life are easily as bucolic and delightful as the poems. And as an added bonus, there are recipes at the back of the book, one for each month celebrating the seasonal culinary delights of the community.
Poetry Friday this week is hosted by Elaine at Wild Rose Reader.