Mennonite in a Little Black Dress (Memoir) (2010) Read Online Free PDF

wrote a recipe down. In 1960, when my mother was first married, she wrote from the tiny parsonage in North Dakota to ask her mother in Canada for the recipe. Oma sent the page from the calendar covered in barely legible Spitzbubben , the old-style Russian-Mennonite German script from the nineteenth century. Nobody except scholars can read this style of penmanship anymore. Even I couldn't do it without Mom's help. In the recipe Oma's voice comes through, practical and vague, advising her daughter to use whatever she has handy in the larder-butter, or margarine, or even chicken fat. Oma assumed that ingredients would vary according to season and budget. She also assumed that knowledge of the correct quantities would miraculously come to my mother in the night. "Take some milk or some water and warm it and then add it to some flour," she advised helpfully. On the calendar side Oma added a brief personal note: "I don't think Heinrich will be coming home before Christmas."
    "I'm going to be making a nice chicken dish for Joel and Erlene Neufeld," my mother told me. "Joel and Erlene just adopted three siblings, and the oldest is five. Poor little things. Their mother abandoned them in a motel. The oldest managed to squeeze through the window to go out and look for food. So Joel and Erlene really have their hands full. You make the soup, and I'll make the chicken dish for Joel and Erlene."
    "You want a Menno soup or a worldly soup?"
    "Oh, make something we haven't tried!"
    In the spirit of filial accommodation, I saved my document to a flash drive and trailed after her to the kitchen.
    Together we stood at the sink, washing our hands. She was running her tongue over a tooth she had chipped the week before. "I wasn't even eating nuts," she said. "It just dropped off. Maybe because I grind my teeth in my sleep. Here, feel it."
    I obediently reached over to touch my mother's jagged tooth.
    My mother unwrapped a Kleenex that she had taken from her pocket. The Kleenex contained half a grayish incisor.
    "Please explain to me why you are carrying that around in a Kleenex," I said.
    She looked at me, surprised. "It's a bone," she said sunnily. "They can glue it back on."
    "Gluing a tooth back on is like trying to reattach a broken fingernail. Just let it go, man."
    She was the nurse in the family, the Solomon of all medical disputes. "This tooth still has a lot of use in it. Did I ever tell you about Hilde's tooth?"
    "Did it drop out?"
    "No. Hilde had a big gap between her two front teeth when we were growing up. She just hated it. She used to cover her mouth when she laughed because she was so ashamed of the space between her teeth."
    "I like a smile like that," I said. "Aaron's got a gap-toothed smile, and it looks great on him."
    "Hilde's space was much bigger than Aaron's. One day after she got a job she went to the dentist and had a little tooth made, and she put it there. It looked funny."
    "You mean she got a bridge, to hide the gap?"
    "No, a whole separate little tooth, wedged right in the middle of the other two. But this little tooth was narrower and smaller than a regular tooth."
    I savored the idea of a compact go-to fairy tooth tucked between its fellows, just the snug essence of tooth. In Low German there's a funny word for the frosty heart of a watermelon: the Abromtje , the Little Abraham. I had always loved that word. It called up the image of a homunculus curled inside the melon, like an exceptionally stern miniature dad in there. My aunt's wee tooth reminded me of the Abromtje ; it would sit small and spare as a haiku, no more than strictly necessary, packing its little wallop of power. How satisfying if we could all fit our cattywampus spaces with tiny dream teeth! And how satisfying to look in the mirror as my Aunt Hilde must have done sixty years ago, congratulating herself on this fake tooth the size of a Chiclet. She must have thought, From now on, when people look at me, they won't see my absence, my loss, my lack.