Walmart Thoughts

I realize right off that it's dangerous in some circles to talk about Walmart, since I once mentioned in a newspaper column that we shop at Walmart and I got about eight letters ranging from entreating to vicious.

I have never really researched this but I believe the biggest complaints that people have about Walmart are that they push smaller businesses out of town (definitely true) and that they exploit someone--I'm not sure if it's their workers or the foreign workers that make their products.

If it's the foreign workers, I don't really understand why people single out Walmart. I would guess that almost every big American company overseas exploits their workers. We've all heard the stories about Nike, and I've read about the garment suppliers for Gap and Tommy Hilfiger and others who aren't any better.

I do as little shopping as possible but I do still on occasion go to Walmart. In fact, yesterday I had a marathon day in town and hit Walmart, the biggest mall in town, Heinke's the bathroom fan supplier, St. Vinnie's, Goodwill, and a bunch of other places.

(Stepping on soapbox here). . . If we're going to boycott places because of how they exploit people, let's all boycott the mall. As I walked down the hallway I saw a group of wild-haired multi-pierced fishnet-stockinged combat-booted girls sashaying along near Abercrombie and Fitch, where an enormous poster of a buff undressed guy attempted unsuccessfully to lure me inside.

The message that the mall shouts is that you have to have the right words on your sweatshirt, the right shoes, the right expensive everything, or you are uncool, worthless, outside the inner circle, the lowest mockery of humanity.

At Walmart, jeans-and-sweatshirted people bought popcorn and light bulbs. The message that Walmart sends is, "Hey, you're out of shampoo. Why don't you get the store brand, it's just as good as Head&Shoulders?"

So where do you think I would rather send my children, and where will they be exploited the most?

(Steps off soapbox)

Walmart has filled a niche by supplying Basic Stuff. I think the people who don't like how they go about it need to seriously think about providing an alternative. If I need basic white cotton socks for Jenny, I know I can go to Walmart and they'll be there.

Also, Walmart has fabric, one of the few such places left in town. JoAnn's has gone over to bridal fabric and Pittsburgh Steelers fabric and stretchy sequined fabric, but at Walmart you can still buy the basics.

And they still have that dollar-a-yard table, so if you have a daughter learning to sew, you can have her experiment on something cheap.

But now Walmart is phasing out their fabric departments. The new stores don't have any at all, and the rumor is that the rest are closing down in the next year. I talked to the clerk at Walmart about it yesterday. It's all decided back in Arkansas, she said. They have very little to do with the decision.

I have often said that what this area needs is a good fabric store, catering to everyone from quilters to Mennonites to people just learning to sew. There are quilt shops with $7-a-yard cottons, but no place with a good variety and particularly not with pretty dress fabrics.

If I weren't so busy with writing and all it entails, I could probably start a fabric store at this time in my life. Since I'm not ready to give up writing just yet, maybe someone else will step into the gap here. There are some vacant stores in Harrisburg just waiting for you. And if no one else does, I guess I have a decision to make. . .

Quote of the Day:
Ben: What's something a good Mennonite housewife does that applies to physics?
Me: I don't know, popping popcorn?
Ben: No, canning! Cuz you know the whole thing of pressure, temperature, and volume?
Me: Indeed.

Heirloom

Glenn Yoder is a dumpy little guy who lived in the same house, between here and Harrisburg, for 80 years, I'm told. His mom was a sister to Paul's grandma Lena.
Glenn never married or travelled or did any number of other things the rest of us do to make our lives interesting. Instead he stood out in his front yard day after day, in his overalls, a bit hunched over, with a little bemused smile on his face, and watched people go by on Diamond Hill Drive and waved at them.
He also saved things. When he was moved to a nursing home recently, cleaning his house was a huge job, I was told.
His nieces held a sale a few days ago, and I stopped by. The amount of old stuff was astonishing, and this was after the family and various antique dealers had been through it. A table full of old calendars from the 1940's on. Old shaving brushes. Rusted galvanized buckets. A cream separator. A milk stool. Ink bottles. Wooden barrels. Sauerkraut crocks. And much much more.
Since we live in the original house where Glenn's mom and Paul's grandma grew up, one of Glenn's nieces pulled me aside and offered me a picture they had found that must have belonged to Paul's great-grandma before she ever married. It is about 8"x10" and has a black mat around a print of red roses in a glass vase. It is beautiful and in good condition, and on the back it still says, in proper old-fashioned handwriting, "Annie Hochstetler."
Of course I got it. I want to frame it and hang it around here somewhere, and wouldn't that be something if I managed to put it right where Annie herself hung it when she lived here?

Quote of the Day:
"We Smuckers should be ruling the world, if you ask me."
--Matt

Story Time With Uncle Fred

I talked to my brother Fred on the phone last week while I was waiting in the Minneapolis airport for my flight to Portland. He is a truck driver with a limitless supply of stories that come out at the oddest moments, often for the first time years after they actually happened. Like this one:

There was a big construction project going on in Denver and they needed this huge 6-foot pipe, which is no problem to haul. But I was hauling two pipe elbows from Salt Lake to Denver, and they were kind of side by side, so I had a wide load, which was no problem out in the wide-open areas, but getting into Denver there’s all this rigamarole you have to go through with a wide load.

Well, I had this 20-year-old map of Colorado that showed all the gravel roads down to little goat trails, and also I used to harvest wheat in that area years ago, so I was kind of familiar with the area. So I decided to drive into Denver the back way, at night, and if I did it right I could get right up to the construction site without hitting any main roads.

Oh, yeah, and this was about two months after 9-11.

So I’m going along this gravel road and I noticed something odd, and that was that there was grass growing in the road. Well, that’s strange. But I kept going, and then after a while here was a chain-link fence across the road in front of me. So I stopped of course.

About that time there were these incredibly bright lights to my left, up a ways, and I realized that that was a runway up ahead, and a plane was about to land right in front of me. And those landing lights are bright, I mean, you could read a newspaper 20 miles away, just about.

So I cut the lights on the truck and decided to watch the plane land, but all of a sudden it wasn’t there any more. I mean, it was just gone, no lights, nothing. And after a few minutes I saw what must have been the same plane land on this other runway about five miles away.

Oh well, ok, whatever. There was pasture all around me so I got the truck turned around and headed back. And after about a mile the vehicles started appearing and I had cop cars all around me.

It didn’t take them too long to figure out that I was exactly what I appeared to be—a dumb Oklahoma truck driver with a 20-year-old map trying to sneak into Denver at night with a wide load, who didn’t realize they’d built the Denver airport in the meantime.

So they were like, Just leave. Just get out of here.

So I did.

Quote of the Day:
"You should be the one with a blog or a newspaper column. I mean, stuff actually happens to you!"
--me, to Fred

Daughters and Mothers

The other day Jenny, the busy, fearless, red-headed 8-year-old, cheerfully announced that it makes her feel so good when people cheer for her. Like, when she's playing kickball or soccer with the boys and Kyle says, "Go Jenny!" And one day she made the only point for her team in kickball.

I looked at her like, Child, can it really be that I gave birth to you?

I was a PE teacher's nightmare, or I would have been, if Miss Jensen had concerned herself about me at all. Somehow she was content to always have Lynn and Robin, the star athletes, choose the teams, and if I was always chosen last, or next-to-last, next to Vicky who was fat and slow, I guess she thought that was the way the world was supposed to work.

But I guess we were talking about me here, and not Miss Jensen, although my sister Becky and I have fun talking about Miss Jensen now, the way it's fun to skewer something and roast it over a fire.

I couldn't bat balls or run fast or understand football. I couldn't make it around the track without slowing to a walk, and the time I tried to run the 880 I threw up in the bathroom afterwards. I couldn't do cartwheels or splits. I was grateful beyond describing when I finally was past the tenth grade and mandatory P.E. I played volleyball with the youth group and grew resigned to having guys lunge in front of me to get the ball so I could do as little damage as possible.

So to have a feisty and very athletic little daughter is like experiencing something I had only vaguely dreamed of. Each year at the school picnic I watch Jenny set her chin determinedly and win the foot race. "I try to imagine that my legs are really long," she says. I watch her sail over the high jump, higher and higher, beating the boys and girls her age until she's competing with boys two years older.

Amazingly enough, she really is my daughter. I gave birth to her at home, so there were no other babies to switch with. It is a very unique experience to watch your daughter shine at something you were simply awful at.

And I just spent a few days with my mom, which always makes me go all cogitating, and it is very interesting to figure out how you are and are not like your mom and your daughters.

Mom and I both love stories, and this time I sat and scribbled notes while she told me all about her first date with Dad and about Ketty Schwanz, the bishop's wife who ran the church. "Ach, you won't put this in a book, will you?" No, but I wish I could.

We also love making things out of nothing, like scrap quilts and crocheted rugs. And we collect way too much stuff.

How I'm different from my mom is I absolutely can't stand it if things don't work. She, meanwhile, happily putters around in a kitchen where the knives are dull, the beaters drop out of the mixer into the potatoes, the pens are all dry, the blender is broken, and the burners won't light. My sister Margaret and I compare cooking-in-Mom's-kitchen stories and one-up each other on how desperate we got. (Well, I ended up taking the half-mixed cream cheese over to Anna's kitchen!)

Also, if I know there's a gadget out there to make my job easier, I buy it. Mom, on the other hand, makes do. While I was there she made tomato soup and strained it through an old-fashioned sieve (her Victorio strainer burned in the house fire in 1987 and she never replaced it). And then when the jars were ready to come out of the canner I went looking for the jar lifter while she calmly took a hot pad and tried to lift out the jars without sloshing herself too badly with boiling water.

I couldn't believe it. All the canning she does and she can't spend two dollars on a jar lifter?? But I guess she's happy that way and if I bought her a jar lifter she probably wouldn't use it.

One more difference: she likes a lot of variety on the table. I tend to make a hot dish and vegetable and that's it.

One day we had scalloped potatoes, chicken, applesauce, sliced tomatoes, lettuce salad, iced tea, and zucchini bread for lunch, and Mom said,

Quote of the Day:
"Ach, it's just kind of a simple meal, for company."
and afterwards she added,
2nd Quote of the Day:
"Could you eat some ice cream yet?"
(No)

MN Musings--5--Moving On

I spent three days with my parents at Grove City after the retreat. It was the first time I had been back since my nephew's funeral in July '06. A lot of people have asked me how my parents are doing and if they've aged since I saw them last.

No, they haven't aged since I saw them last. In fact, we are all doing much better than the last time we saw each other, since the week of the funeral we were all stumbling around in a daze and just barely on this side of functional. Mom and Anna (Lenny's mom) drifted around like little silent ghosts, none of us were eating or sleeping--aacckk, I don't even like to think about how we all were.

When I talk to Marcus and Anna on the phone they talk about how the pain is as deep and sharp as ever, the questions as looming and answer-less. So it was so nice to actually see them in person and realize how far they've come. Anna took me out to the memory garden and chatted happily about who gave this ornament or that plant, and how she planned for which flowers to bloom in which season. Marcus had a bit more light in his eyes and chuckled about how smug Anna was when she took two of her delicious cake rolls to a neighborhood supper and was the star of the evening.

I went to the cemetery and saw the gravestone for the first time. And shed a bunch of healing tears. And left a bouquet of fall leaves I had gathered at Mom and Dad's.

Sometimes it doesn't seem right that life moves on, but what a mercy that it does.

MN Musings--4--Hospitality/Ministry

Recently I read a post on the difference between hospitality and entertaining, but now I don't know where it's at, so if it rings a bell with you, let me know and I'll link it.
(edit: ok, here it is. Thanks, ribbit98)

The ladies' retreat really made me think about the ministry of hospitality: of serving others, ministering to them, and bringing solace and healing by putting thought and effort into creating a beautiful place, serving nutritious-delicious food, and being aware of physical needs.

I have been in some very difficult situations in my life when I felt helpless, abandoned, and un-cared-for, so when someone goes to great efforts to create a special environment for me, I melt all over the place with gratitude. And with admiration, because hospitality is not my gift.

It is, however, my cousin Kay's gift, and she was determined to make the environment at the ladies' retreat like a soothing hospital for wounded women.

So we entered the main dining hall under a white archway, to the sound of running water from small fountains nestled among potted plants and a small picket fence. We chose chocolate-fondue treats from among strawberries and marshmallows on skewers, clustered into cute bouquets. We sat down one evening at beautifully laid tables with crocheted doilies and candles, and then a line of trim black-shirted young men* filed out of the kitchen and served us a delicious meal.

Such was the entire place, the entire weekend.

The message of it all was not, "Look how much money we spent," or "Look at how talented I am.' The message was, "This is for you. You are special and loved and cared for."

And that is what hospitality is all about.

*I confess I looked at them and said to my neighbor, "Goodness, I should have brought my daughters along after all."

Quote of the Day:
(another far-too-typical at-our-house conversation)
Steven: Jenny, please go away.
Jenny: You have to say the magic word.
Steven: I already said please.
Jenny: There's three words.
Steven: Please. Go. Away.
Emily: Steven, it's "Please, dear sister."
Jenny: Yep, that's it, but you have to say it, Steven.
Ben: Please, elk sister.
Steven: Please, moose sister.
Ben: White-tail or black-tail?

MN musings--3--Sisters in Christ at Least

Hope Byler is a woman who was also a Yoder and grew up in Minnesota, but our paths never crossed much until recent years. She grew up at Blackduck and I at Grove City, some 200 miles away.

A few times in the past I've had people ask me if I'm by any chance related to "this woman from Minnesota named Hope Byler?" "Not that I know of," I said.

Both Hope and I were at the retreat and it was downright weird how often people came up to either her or me and asked if we're sisters. I don't think either of us would have thought of any resemblance, but evidently we resemble each other a lot, especially the forehead and eyes, we were told.

Hope and I got our head together for a picture, which I haven't been able to transfer here yet (but will if I can.) We also got our heads together and decided that one reason we resemble each other is because she also has a poof in her hair! The Last Two Poofs in America, I guess.

It also turns out that we are within 5 months of each other in age, and are both writers and have large families. And, of all things, both our middle names are Elaine. But even though we were both Yoders, we aren't related as far back as we could trace.

My daughters think I should flatten my poof, but Hope's children say:

Quote of the Day:
"Oh Mom, you'd look terrible without your poof!"

MN Musings--2: The Funny Incident

My cousin Kay, the main organizer of the retreat, had fixed up a small Sunday school room for me with a fat air mattress and plenty of blankets. Showers were in the restrooms by the kitchen.

I don't know exactly how many women slept at the church, but it was a lot. Down hallways and in classrooms I saw piles of sleeping bags and duffel bags and pillows.

Thursday night I slept fine. Friday night was a different story. A twittering like distant birds kept waking me up. I'd doze off, wake up, and doze off again. As the night wore on the twittering was accompanied by louder voices and footsteps. For a number of reasons I was pretty sure it was a flock of teenaged girls.

Finally at 3:30 I thought, you know, I have to give a talk in the morning and if that were my daughters I would just go ask them to be quiet.

So I left my dark room and stumbled down the hall in my awful pajamas and with my hair all over the place, down to where the door stood open and light shone out. Squinting, I stuck my head around the door and beheld a group of probably seven pj'd girls looking absolutely horrified. With round eyes and shaking hands they exclaimed, "We're sorry!!" "Oh, we're just so sorry!"

I am told I asked them sweetly to be a bit quieter, and then I went back to bed and slept blissfully.

The next morning it seemed there were teenage girls giving me nervous and guilty looks but since I hadn't had my contacts in the night before and the girls were all ready for bed, there's no way I could have identified them in the light of day. One came over to me and very sincerely apologized. I assured her it was ok.

After the retreat I rode to Mom and Dad's with some of the Grove City ladies. The next morning after church a young lady named Renee asked me nervously if I slept better last night than the night before. I said, "Oh my, were you in that group?"
She exclaimed, "Yes! Oh we just felt so bad! We had no idea there was anyone else down that hall."

I also assured her it was fine.

I have chuckled over this many times since--those horrified round-eyed girls. It must have been very disconcerting to not only find out you had kept someone awake, but that it was the speaker lady herself. Even if the speaker lady herself had frowzy graying hair and dreadful flannel pajamas.

Minnesota Musings 1

My dad asked me how the flavor of women at the International Falls retreat compared with a similar retreat I spoke at four years ago, in Georgia.

I knew there were a number of differences but I couldn't put my finger on the main one until I recalled a conversation with my cousin Loretta, who had come to the retreat all the way from Kalona, Iowa and who has adopted two boys. She asked me how Steven was doing, and I mentioned the ongoing task of convincing him that he has a mom now. For instance, if he gets hurt he'll bandage it himself rather than tell me about it. And Loretta said, "Ah, he's a survivor! I have one of those too."

That, I decided, is what many of the women were as well: survivors. The Georgia women four years ago had an aura of establishment, tradition, gentility, graciousness, and wealth. The Minnesota women had much more of a sense of upheaval, change, scrappiness, overcoming difficulties, and poverty. In short--of surviving.

There were stout Russian Mennonites from Manitoba, missionary women from way up north, farm wives, women who only recently joined the Mennonite church and were coping with opposition from their families, and many others.

The theme of the southern retreat was joy, and the weekend was a lot of fun, which was fine because I think we needed that at that time. The northern theme, in contrast, was Trusting God's Promises, a heavier subject that meant that I was bombarded during break times with story after story of suffering and tragedy. Of course I was happy to listen, since one of the purposes of my talks was to convince the women that they each had a story to tell. But by the end, the collective weight of these women's experiences felt very heavy. Losing a child, abandoned by a husband, severe health issues, terrible abuse, and on and on.

However: an equal theme was God's goodness, and these suffering women had the most astonishing stories of God's faithfulness and grace.

I also heard many adoption stories that still make the backs of my arms prickle when I think of them, they were so unquestionably miraculous.

The women in the South had pretty much all fit into a fairly narrow slice of the Mennonite spectrum. Not these in Minnesota. There were local evangelical women from town, the Russian Mennonites as mentioned, ex-Hutterites, Beachy Amish, conservative Mennonites. And, since we often categorize Mennonite women by their head coverings--there were white caps, veils of all shapes and sizes and colors, scarves, and no head coverings at all.

At both retreats I felt welcomed, embraced, listened to, ministered to, and affirmed. There's something powerful about 300 Christian women getting together. Lots of good memories.

Quote of the Day:
"I hated my dad for 28 years. It's so nice to not hate my dad any more."
--one of the women, sharing her story during testimony time

Seattle

Emily and I made the 6-hour trip to Seattle (actually Bellevue, a bit to the east) yesterday, arriving at the hotel in time for me to take a short nap before I dressed up all professional and walked over to the fancy convention center for the PNBA event.

I was nervous but ok, until I walked into the room. See, each publisher was supposed to mail 150 copies of their author's book ahead of time, and then we would sign them all, and then each bookstore rep present would get a free copy. So. I walked into the room and there were stacks and stacks of books, and the nice organizer lady told me sadly that my books never showed up.

"What??"
"No, we've looked everywhere. We were hoping you had brought them. Unfortunately this seems to happen to about one author every time."

I always seem to have a knack for "winning" this kind of lottery.

Naturally, I did what any tough, red-blooded, professional American woman would do: burst into tears and called Paul. The volunteers there were very nice and we decided to make copies of my handout and give that out instead of a book, but sadly when the volunteers filled the bags for the attendees, a lot of them didn't include my paper.

I thought, Why oh why didn't I take Clara Schnupp's workshop at the ladies' retreat on Handling Life's Disappointments?

Then we authors sat at two tables and ate our fancy supper. First fresh spinach with cubes of cold yellow beets, then the main course, then an apple dessert that was ok but not as good as Paul's mom's apple pie. The couscous was (were?) interesting and good, the pork belly tasted like any pork from the crock pot, only a little more peppery, and the "braised escarole and roasted shallots" were limp and overdone IMHO and a bit slimy. And according to my ticket this was all worth $55, which of course in my Amish mind translates to about 4 days worth of home-cooked fare for my entire household. Sorry to any purists out there: I am not a gourmet food person.

I sat near two authors who were nice to talk to--Jay Inslee, who was very much a politician, and Lisa Lutz, who was surprisingly shy.

Then came the fun part: spending 20 minutes at each of 5 tables talking to bookstore people about Upstairs the Peasants are Revolting. Many of these were small-town folks from places like Lewiston, Idaho, who were very interested in the Amish/Mennonite angle and asked lots of questions and at times said they already have the book in their store. I felt like they were rooting for me, which is very different from trying to convince people who don't really want to be convinced.

And several went on and on about how impressed they were with the Amish response to the Nickel Mines shooting last October. Did those families ever imagine their lives would have an impact on some fancy book person in Seattle, Washington, even almost a year after the tragedy? Amazing.

Then I went back to the hotel and Emily and I went out for a late meal at Denny's and talked about which guys in books she would like to date: Peter Pan and Tuck Everlasting, it turns out. Two boys who never grew up, which is very disturbing.

And then today we drove home, and there's no place like it.

It turns out someone at Good Books dropped the ball and misplaced an email and never sent the books. Ooooooh. So glad I'm not him.

Quote of the Day:
Jenny: Ben, you're handsome, but not quite as handsome as Steven.
Ben: Hey!!