Old Order Mennonite Memoirs

Dear June,

I wanted you and waited for your warmth, but you were influenced by May in your first day. Your frightening 38 degrees soon dissipated, however, then you whammed us with 90 degrees. In our struggle to adapt to your radical climate, we tossed our jackets and welcomed your sudden summer. Your warmth coaxed new leaves to unfurl on mountain ridges and although you healed and uncurled hosta leaves after May tried to kill them, no amount of coaxing brought lilies from buds that May stole. Only a few of the many in my gardens are blooming in your days.

Influenced also by dry May, you gave us only 3 inches of refreshing showers. We went suddenly from fear of frost to wishing for rain. Your lightning strikes electrified the air and your thunder rumbled like prowling lions as we watched your partial storms, hoping for a coveted drink for our fields and gardens.

But you made the color green become lush around us. Corn responded to every drop of rain and reached with green arms across the row. Grass and weeds stretched and succumbed to our mowers and weed-eaters. We were partial to the different greens in our gardens and flowerbeds, yanking some out, coddling others. Because we did, we harvested goods to share, mostly green, as in lettuce, kale, cabbage and broccoli. After the asparagus, came sugar peas and shell peas.

Some of them had blushes of red like rhubarb and others were all red, like strawberries and cherries. Strawberries hugged the ground and I bent low to harvest them. For cherries I climbed ladders at Ridge Top Orchards. With others, my daughter and I searched for the dangling orbs still hiding among the green leaves. Tyson, 7, and Conner, 4, occasionally spilled their buckets or fell out of the trees while Lyla, 3, frightened us when she disappeared among the rows of fruit trees. I enjoyed the first-time experience, not only to drink in the awesome view of scenery but also to be a scavenger. The idea of gathering what grew in your days, appeals to me, especially while I read that people are dying of hunger. When God makes food to grow in your days, I believe He wants us to use it or share it, not waste it. Harvesting foods that grow, means taking time to shell and cap and pit while talking with beloved family or singing all my memory songs.

Between all your beautiful sunrises and sunsets, milestones were reached and memories made. Our youngest son married his Love on one of your most loveliest days with their many friends and family all around. New chapters in our lives began.

In your days five of my siblings added another year to their lives. You are part of the steady march of time. We shared breakfasts with friends and sisters, picnics with family and relished your moments as they hastened by.

In your days we went to the house of the Lord four times and in three of those, youth expressed their desire to be baptized this fall. We left our shawls and overcoats at home because your breezes were gentle and your sunbeams were life-giving.

My list of your goodness is too long. Bouquets sit and butterflies flit. Trees shade us, bees aid us. Mulch and mud and mercy, home and health and heat. Roses and robins and rainbows, songs and seeds and sunglasses. Baby Bella and baby bluebirds and baby beans.

But you know what, June? For all your beauty, you still can't hold a candle to my Real Home. With your joy there is pain, mingled with your peace is strife, with your comfortable warmth are itchy flea bites and never a garden without weeds and bugs threatening it. Not a thing you offer is exempt from decaying or waxing old, in fact, we know it will all be burned up some day. My Real Home on high (as Ruby Moody calls it in her song) is not made with earthly hands. And this is the only reason why I want to say.................

Good-bye.