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.
David’s Trip to Paraguay: The Land of Amazing Colours by Miriam Rudolph (CMU Press, 2011) is a recently published children’s book that tells the story of young David who recounts a long and arduous journey from a small southern Manitoba farm to the Chaco region of Paraguay in 1927. A bilingual book — text is in German and in English – the book is also colorfully illustrated with Rudolph’s vibrant images, cleverly ‘stitched’ as it were, by all the various modes of transport David takes to get to his final destination. My daughter enjoyed connecting each illustrated page to the previous one by finding the travel image — whether railroad, or boat — unique to both. In the front of the book, the entire set of travel images are united in a long band showing the journey.
How did David come to take this trip? In 1927, a group of Mennonites in southern Manitoba, disheartened by the province’s ruling against the presence of German schools in certain immigrant communities like theirs, left Canada for the remote Chaco area in Paraguay. David’s parents were of these Mennonites. This long trip left a deep impression on a young boy, and later David would recount his memories of this trip to his grandchildren, one of them, being the author and illustrator of this book, Miriam Rudolph.
My daughter and I enjoyed reading this colorful book together, and maybe, some day she can read it with her Oma in German!
A few postings ago, I wrote about books about winter in Canada. Today’s featured book is considered a Canadian classic. It depicts the life of a family of homesteading Mennonites in northern British Columbia. Mary of Mile 18 is set in the remote community of Mile 18, so named because of its location, eighteen miles off of a turn-off on the Alaska Highway. Author Anne Blades worked as a teacher for the children of this community a few years before the book’s publication in 1971. The beginning of the book sets the tone of the story:
It is a cold winter in northern British Columbia. At the Fehr farm snow has covered the ground since early November and it will not melt until May.
Little Mary Fehr is the oldest of five. It is through her eyes that the reader gets a glimpse of the harsh realities of homesteading in such a severe climate. There is no running water nor electricity in the Fehr house. Snow is brought in by pailfuls by the children to be melted for household water needs. The house is heated by a wood-burning stove and a barrel heater; both of which consume a lot of wood and keep the house just barely warm enough. The truck engine must be heated with a propane torch for an hour before it will start.
Despite these conditions, Mary is cheerful and sees beauty in her surroundings. One day she discovers an abandoned half-wolf pup near her house and wants to keep it. Her father however, is stern. “You know the rules. Our animals must work for us or give us food.” Mary is devastated. How could such a pitiful creature prove useful to the household? The rest of the story is about how Mary and her father come to terms about his rules and her desire. And it is the outcome that has made this story the classic that it is.
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.