Old Order Mennonite Memoirs

In 1942 Margaret Wise Brown wrote "The Runaway Bunny." That I can share her story with my granddaughter Bella, age 2, so many years later, is a wonder to me. We've shared many books already for their worth in pictures but the bunny that wanted to run away from its mother held her attention to the end, even as other books lay strewn around us.

Bella was sitting on my lap and I was on the floor at her house when I read to her about the little bunny that threatened to become a fish in the stream to run away from his mother. His mother always had a way in which she would catch him whatever he would become. As a fisherman she would catch the fish. As a mountain climber she would climb to him if he were a high rock. As a gardener she would find him, the blooming crocus hidden in the garden. If he were a bird she would be a tree. If he became a sailboat, she would be the wind and blow him where she wanted him to go. There was no escape from his mother even as a flying trapeze or a little boy in a house.

Little Bunny gave up, "I might just as well stay where I am and be your little bunny." And so he did.

"Have a carrot," said the mother bunny. Offering carrots, as a mother, is something I understand. Last week I dug the last of those orange spindle-shaped edible roots because snow flurries drifted on frigid breezes and urged me to get to it and so I did.

But by Friday I didn't even need my sweater as I worked outside all day. The fire in the wood stove, which my husband started on Monday to ward off chills, felt like overkill but the bubble gum petunias and the spider plants showed telltale signs of their encounter with Jack Frost. Removing their cascading skeletons and bruised blackness from my brick walls gave my patio a bare look but I didn't have to look far for a different filler.

Using my pruning shears I clipped the tips of long sections of fir branches. The towering evergreen that began growing here on the farm as a little seedling in 1976, just quietly lay down in Sunday evening's storm (Nov. 15). The upturned roots were evidence of the screaming wind. Having taken the last lashing from Old Mother West Wind, the boughs lay well within the reach of my sharp tool.

As winter flexed its muscle to warn us, we prepared our fields and gardens for dormant rest. Our hands got cold on my daughter's deck as we cranked the last tomatoes (that had been waiting in the freezer) through the strainer for pizza sauce but baling alfalfa hay on November's 20th day, was a first for my farming husband.

A chilly, damp cloudiness moved in for the weekend. Warmth and contentment was indoors, both in my kitchen cleaning out kitchen cupboards on Saturday and in Piney Creek church soaking up God's word on Sunday. The last mums and yarrow of my garden in a bouquet, reminded me of Margaret Bottome's excerpt in "Streams in the Desert."

"I have always been glad that the psalmist said to God that some things were hard. There is no mistake about it; there are hard things in life. Some beautiful pink flowers were given to me.... and as I took them I said, "What are they?" And the answer came, "They are rock flowers; they grow and bloom only on rocks where you can see no soil." Then I thought of God's flowers growing in hard places. I feel that He may have a peculiar tenderness for His "rock flowers" that He may not have for His lilies and roses."

We can't deny that the year 2020 had shown us hard things, strange and unreal, but we can stand on the shoulders of poets like King David and Joachim Neander and offer "Praise to the Lord! Who o'er all things so wondrously reigneth, Shelters 'us' under His wings, yea, so gently sustaineth; Hast thou not seen How thy desires e'er have been Granted in what He ordaineth?"