What's left of Pennsylvania

    April break.  Rachel and I drive through Pennsylvania to look at some places she might go to school.  We make our way south and west, from Easton to Allentown, Lancaster to Carlisle, and finally on to Gettysburg.  

Parts of it remain legitimate farm country.  Through much of it, though, the farms, or the last bits of what used to be farms, are just remnants of what used to be, nearly lost now amidst the relentless sprawl, half-hidden by the ubiquitous billboards.  I try to say to Rachel how all this seems to me -- how evocative and bittersweet.  And that is even before we see two Amish buggies plugging along the roads of Lancaster County.

I think of how my grandparents used to talk about this countryside, how they couldn't get over how "built up" everything had become during their lifetimes.  

KC and I went for a ride with Claude and Naomi once, Grammy and Grandpop Shisler, just after Claude had gotten out of the hospital.  He had, finally and suddenly, a painful sense of his own age and health.  He was eighty-two then.  

 We took them to lunch in Lederach.  Naomi tried to steer him into ordering things that wouldn’t be quite as bad for his heart and his weight.  The salad for an appetizer, instead of the salty pea soup.  But she knew he was too set in his ways.  And why not?  He was eighty-two, after all.  He should just have the hot soup and be happy.  It has good chunks of ham and lots of crackers on the side.  Just the way we like it. 

 After we finish the rest of our lunch – sandwiches and the obligatory iced tea – we take the long way back to the nursing home.  The Mennonites who live there, whatever their faults, at least are honest about where they are.  This is not a “senior center” or a “retirement community.”  They are old and not afraid to say they live in a nursing home.

 They had insisted we take their car, but I was permitted to drive it.  The latest of my grandfather’s long line of lightly used Oldsmobiles or Buicks.  He used to buy them two years old and sell them four years old – not a bad way to do it.  This last one, however, was just that – the last one, which he'd had for ten years or so.  He hardly drove anymore.  Still, it was sad that he had decided this would be his last car.

 He gives the directions as we go, along a winding route past the landmarks of his childhood in and around Souderton.  This was real farm country not so long ago, and still had a few cornfields and silos.  But the suburban Philadelphia sprawl was overwhelming.  My grandparents could see through it, underneath it, to the land and the houses and the barns of seventy years ago.  A few of these landmarks are still there.  My grandparents help me imagine what's gone.

 We drive along in the hot sun.  Grandpop, of course, sits up front with me.  Grammy (do only Mennonites use this word?) sits in back with my wife, whispering things about men and chuckling.  It makes me smile.

 We drive by the old fieldstone house my grandfather was born in.  He shows us the gully across the road where he and his dog used to chase frogs and fish in a small stream at the edge of a field.  Now the gully cuts through an impeccable lawn behind a house with a satellite dish.  My grandmother says that lately he has been talking about this dog all the time.

 Up the road we pass the barn where my grandfather’s grandfather collapsed and died.  The stone foundation and parts of the lower walls are still there.  Grandpop tells us how his grandfather was working in the barn in the middle of summer, probably a day like today, when he just collapsed and died.  My grandfather was six years old.

 When our tour is over, we leave them back at the nursing home and drive away.  I wonder if I will have a grandson of my own.  If I do, there won’t be any stories about how my grandfather died working in a barn.

 I worried then that my grandfather would hang on a few more years, he and Grammy each trying hard not to be the first to go so the other wouldn't die of loneliness.  But then he finally would die -- the men, at last, go first -- but not, I feared, until someone called an ambulance and the paramedics worked to revive him and he was rushed to a hospital where doctors would put lines into his tired veins and tied him to machines and maybe even shocked his weary heart.  There was something to be said, I thought then and still do, for dying out in a barn, working with the other men, on a summer afternoon.

     As it turned out, he died at the nursing home, with perfect suddenness.  Grammy said he was sitting on the edge of the bed when he bent down to tie his shoe.  When he sat up, he simply laid back on the bed and died.  She called the nurse, but he was gone.  She laid with him there for a while, a couple of hours, before she was ready to let them take him away. 

Grammy died a few years later.  Naomi.  A beautiful, old-fashioned name.  She was my mother’s aunt, and then her stepmother.  My mother’s mother, Susanna, died from multiple sclerosis when my mother was ten.  During Susanna’s invalid years, Naomi came to live with the family, taking care of her sister and helping Claude care for the house and the four children.  Not too long after Susanna died, but not too quickly either, Claude and Naomi were married.

 Naomi was, as the speakers at her service reminded us, a woman of simple pleasures and generous spirit – a Christian woman through and through, who actually lived like it.  She lived simply and carefully and took pride in doing every last thing, from housekeeping to piano to penmanship (so much about her penmanship!), all as well as her talents and diligent practice would allow. 

 My Aunt Barbara gave the eulogy, as Naomi had desired.  Barbara is my uncle Harold’s wife, who has published some poetry and essays in various Mennonite publications over the years.  She spoke well and with obvious affection for Naomi, gently working a nice metaphor involving apples in and out of her stories and reflections about Naomi, as we all looked at a beautiful basket of multicolored apples overflowing on a table at the front of the room.

 And yet Barbara’s fine eulogy, and the warm remarks of the others who spoke, were overshadowed in the end by a story told after the service, about Naomi quitting school when she was sixteen, an age when Mennonites of her generation “turned plain” and entered the church.  One version of the story is that her parents pressured her to leave school, I suppose because attending school beyond that age was viewed as too “worldly” for a sixteen-year-old girl, and maybe for a boy as well.  Another version is that her parents had nothing to do with it, at least directly, but that Naomi was too ashamed to go to school wearing the small, white cap that Mennonite women wore at the time (some still do) and that she now would wear once she had entered the church.

 The two versions are, I suppose, not really that different.  They have the same, sad ending either way.


All of this now seems, already, a long time ago.  


We'll see where Rachel goes to school.  If one of these schools is right for her, I wouldn't mind a few more drives through Pennsylvania.