Old Order Memoirs

After a day filled to the brim, an early bedtime would be tempting but hopefully I can stay awake until I finished my little letter. Although Christmas hasn’t been here yet, our little family celebrated it at our house today.

Our middle daughter and her family went with us to Piney Creek church with Reeses and the buggy. Back in my kitchen at noon the potatoes waited, covered with a sleeping bag, hot and ready for mashing with butter and hot milk. There was plenty of food for the 25 people (which included my dad), from dinner rolls and meatloaf to Christmas cookies and coffee.

Although the sun came out in the afternoon with calm winds, everyone seemed content indoors. After the food and dishes, the grandchildren played with their new toys and their parents played games of Quoridor and Goblet.

The gift for my dad was unique. The pattern for the wooden family “tree” came from Lancaster County and was constructed by our nephew of Elkhorn Furniture. Instead of a tree, there are two doves with a large heart between them. That heart bears the names of my parents and their birth dates and their wedding day. Under the heart is a horizontal bar to bear the family surname and on it hang 10 wooden hearts to bear the names and dates of us 10 children and our spouses. From each of those hearts, hang more smaller hearts to record the grandchildren. Although my husband and I worked together to do all the hook and eye and chain construction, we were thankful for our daughter to do all the name and date painting besides the pink or blue outlining, according to gender for each wooden heart.

With such attention to detail and fact, I became aware of a significant mistake in my former record counting. Where my siblings questioned the number 30 for Dad’s great-grandchildren, no one asked me if there really are 60 grandchildren. They should have because I was wrong. Once we started making and hanging wooden hearts for each grandchild, we came up with only 55, with the girls leading by five.

Wooden treasures was also part of our lives earlier in the week when my husband and I worked together in the sunny outdoors to split and stack firewood. Although we mostly had our attention to the work on hand, we sometimes looked up in the sky just to appreciate the lovely sunshine. One afternoon sun dogs to the side of the sun caught our attention. Looking straight up we also saw a snippet of rainbow, called a circumzenithal arc.

By Friday, however, when the girls and children came to make cut out cookies and decorate them, the sun was hidden. Little showers of rain fell gently from the sky on a warm day. With the bake oven heated we actually opened windows for a breath of fresh, cooler air.

Besides cookies, there was a crock pot full of cheddar chowder to share at noon. We also took time to sing songs together and the children loved when I read them Christmas stories. They crowded around me and Trevor, age 2, knew if he’d sit still on my lap, he’d fall asleep. As he jiggled and wiggled around on my lap, I knew how he felt. If we keep moving, we stay awake. Eventually his little curly, golden-haired head began to nod and jerk and he was gone, just like me when I sit down to write a little letter.

The battle to stay awake tonight was only partly successful. My pillow and my bed were calling me persistently, but I am almost at the end now. I will include that the singing for the youth was at Muley Lane on Saturday evening. The full moon hid from them, but came out in its full glory to shine in the morning before it slipped behind the western horizon on our second day of winter.

And I guess my letter isn’t complete unless I write about butternut squash. Not only did I can some again but two of them found new homes after being placed innocently at the end of our lane, waiting for hands to rescue them for a future home in pumpkin pie.