Tag: Mennonite

Backdrop / Paisajes

dianarenee1 Comment

Let me paint a few colors onto the backdrop/paisajes:

In my heart and I am a writer but I have an 8-5 day job at a clinic. It’s alright.  No, no soy ni doctora ni enfermera.  That’s all I’m saying about it because at clinics, confidentiality is huge.  I have a husband who loves and supports me but I don’t mean financially.

I live in a little town that I do not love, in the country where I was born and raised. I graduated from college a long time ago and then moved to the jungle for a good while. I once thought I would go to grad school and perhaps someday I will but, honestly, if I had the money for grad school, I’d use it to leave the country again. I was happy in the jungle. Mi alma estaba en paz, una paz que ahora recuerdo pero me esquiva. Now I am simply homesick. Before any of that happened, I was a Mennonite girl on a farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. It is important that you know these things about me para que comprendas si me eschuchas hablar sola.

In a few months, my first real book will be released and so all around that quiet core of sadness, I am wildly delighted! I always stubbornly believed, against all evidence, that someday this would happen, and how I love it when I turn out to be right. No es todo el tiempo. I have so many thoughts, feelings, doubts and questions around releasing a book and I have recently discovered mountains of writing, days’ worth of blogged reading material, on the subject. Y la verdad es que todo me suena igual and I would rather say something original.  Tal vez me gusta ser un poco reclusa; ya me acostumbré.

Everybody says your blog posts should offer something, help somebody get what they want. Yo no tengo nada. I can only offer a window to a different world; mine. I can offer a hand you could grab onto. I can offer stories and pictures of things you might recognize as somehow almost your own. Puedo ofrecer una voz que habla, una que se puede escuchar para comprobar que no estás solo.  I can always tell the truth.

Short Hair Like Boys (from “When The Roll Is Called A Pyonder”)

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(from When The Roll Is Called A Pyonder, release date: August 19, 2014 by eLectio Publsihing.)

*****

Mommy washes our hair on Saturdays so it will be clean for church.  Me and Wanda have long hair and Mommy has to wash it because we can’t.

I don’t like it when Mommy washes my hair.  Sometimes I cry.  She washes me with pink soap in the bathtub and then I have to turn around so the water is coming out behind me.  The water is coming out and she pushes me over backwards until my hair is under the spigot and my hair gets heavy and my head feels like it’s going to fall off.  Then I can sit up and Mommy puts shampoo on my head.  She scratches it all around with her fingers.  She does it hard and it hurts.  I ask Mommy does she have to do it with her fingernails? She says Oh Honey I’m Not Using My Fingernails, I Just Use My Fingers.  Then she doesn’t scratch quite as hard anymore until next time.

When it’s time to rinse the shampoo out she makes me put my head back under the water again.  I get to put a washcloth over my eyes so shampoo doesn’t get in them.  Water is splashing all over my face and my nose tickles and I can’t see and I can’t breathe.  Mommy rubs out the shampoo and I have to hold my head up and I can’t hold it up anymore.  But if I sit up I get in trouble and if I put my head back the whole way all the water goes in my nose and mouth.  I wish we could have short hair like boys but the Bible says we can’t. It’s not fair but we have to obey it.

After bath, Daddy combs us.  Daddy always says our hair is pretty and it smells good like shampoo.  He says I Smell ‘Poo for shampoo and we laugh because we aren’t allowed to say that word.  Daddy can say it though when he means shampoo.  If Mommy hears him say it she says Lamar and looks at him out of the top of her eyes.

In the summer Daddy takes the blue comb and sits on the porch and combs out the tangles.  I wear my Noah’s Ark jammies.  We listen to the peepers and Daddy tells me about animals like peepers that are really little frogs and about fish that live in the pond and bumblebees that live in nests and worms that live in the dirt.  He tells me stories about when he was a little boy.  In the winter we can’t sit outside, we have to sit inside and me and Daddy watch Hee Haw on tv while he combs me.  People on that program talk funny and they walk around in the cornfield and Miss Minnie forgot to take the tag off her hat.  Mommy doesn’t like Hee Haw and she doesn’t like Daddy to watch it, or us.  She says it’s too dumb and she tries to wash our hair during it so we can’t watch.