Tea and Trouble Brewing

The part of Dorcas Smucker’s newest book Tea and Trouble Brewing that tells about her performing midwifely duties for one of her father’s milk goats caught my high school students a little off guard when I read it to them last week.  The story was buried in the chapter called “Discovering Dad’s Past” and they never saw it coming.  To their credit, they laughed aloud, and in the process, caught exactly what I wanted them to catch. Well-written family history is fun to read.

Before I read the story I told my composition class about several of the little connections we Mennonites love to uncover, share,  and celebrate.  I said that Dorcas had grown to adulthood in Minnesota, in the church and community where our school’s principal, Mr. Schrock, lived as a child.  The chapter I read aloud told the story of Dorcas having traveled to speak at a meeting in Oklahoma where I had gone to hear her.  On that same trip she visited the windswept farm on which her father lived as a child.  Dorcas’s Uncle Jonny, who 80 years ago planted the water lilies Dorcas saw still growing in the stock tank on that farm, now lives several hundred yards down the road from our school.

There’s more.  My father and Dorcas’s father, Amos Yoder, were friends as young men–both college-educated anomalies among the Amish people whose faith and lifestyle they embraced.  My mother grew up in the Iowa community where Dorcas was born, and some of the people who still live there are related to both of us.  At least 50 years ago, for one day, I visited the one-room school my mother used to attend, and Dorcas’s father was the teacher.  

My students were spared some of the details with which I have just inundated you.  The main point of reading the story to them was to provide a picture of how they might carry out an assignment I’ve  given them.  They are to write narratives taken from their own family history.  Dorcas, with whom I hope they now feel some connection, showed them how it’s done and saved me the trouble.

Most of Dorcas’s book, while often reflective and thoughtful, zeroes in on the varied Smucker family events of last week or the week before that.  Her farmhouse has windows on a very wide world–from floating among the hippos in Lake Victoria in Kenya to fishing in an Oregon River, wearing up-to-the-armpits waders, because it pleased the son who used to live in an orphanage in Kenya.    Dorcas learned to fish in Ontario lakes when she lived there in an isolated Indian community when her oldest children were small.

On the homier side of the farmhouse windows, animal babies are sometimes nurtured indoors, and rambunctious boys and an inquisitive husband can’t resist experimenting with fire and explosives and air under pressure in a big canner.  Arguments between opinionated family members erupt regularly without apparent damage to anyone’s psyche.  Interspersed throughout Dorcas’s stories are bulls-eye lines like this one, after Dorcas unwittingly embarrassed her son in front of a stranger: “Ben looked deflated, his teenage-macho-meter points plunging into the negatives.”  All of us who have raised boys or who associate with high school students recognize this description as being precisely on target.

Prior personal family-and-friends connections with Dorcas are clearly not essential for squeezing lots of pleasure from her writings.  One story after another is fertile enough for such connections to sprout and grow a little stronger with every encounter. Dorcas’s life is the ordinary stuff of our lives as well, highlighted in her case with skill and grace and humor.  Her piercing perspective gives us eyes for the significance of events in our own experience, and her reflections prompt us to look for meaning in those events and circumstances.  I hope you decide to buy a book and see it all for yourself.  

Courtesy of Dorcas, I’m giving away an autographed copy of Tea and Trouble Brewing to one of the people who responds to this post in a comment.  Please include one detail, snippet, or story from your own family history, along with anything else you’d like to say.  You should know that all comments are routinely moderated and will not appear instantly on the blog–my way of avoiding spam or inappropriate content.  I’ll do the drawing on Sunday, November 18, probably around 5:00 CST, announce the results on this blog, and mail the book out after that.

Anyone who wants a book and fails to win it here or elsewhere can order it directly from Dorcas by mailing $15.00 to 31148 Substation Drive, Harrisburg, OR 97446.  This price includes postage.  All four of her books can be purchased from Dorcas for $40.00, again including postage.  If you wish to pay by credit card, Amazon is the best option.  Here’s the link.  

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My granddaughter, Arwen Elizabeth, had the amazing good fortune to arrive last evening, hearty and hungry, just in time for the announcement to be appended to this post.  She was born to Joel and Hilda, their first child, our second grandchild.  Her arrival is an important milestone in our family history and in our nation’s history (OK, that was over dramatized.) because, according to credible personal research, she is the very first female Iwashige ever to be born on American soil–a Virginia Dare born right in our own family.

Arwen weighed in at 9 lb. 2 oz. and measured 21 inches long.  Unlike our first grandchild, who is astonishingly blond, this one has the black hair one would expect from a baby with Asian ancestry.

Arwen’s first name is of Welsh origin.  With a Tristan and a Shane already in the family, you might suspect family origins in the British Isles rather than on the European mainland and in Japan, but no.  Cosmopolitan, I’d like to think.  The name means fine, fair, noble maiden.  Those who are Lord of the Rings literate will recognize the name from that story.  Joel is a great fan of such literature, and the baby’s full name wonderfully reflects her parents’ characteristics–knowledgeable, classy, a little edgy, and rock-solid all at the same time.  My mother’s middle name is Elizabeth, so the name choice echoes family fealty also.

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And now that you’ve seen a bit of “Babies and Bragging Brewing” please turn your attention back to the first subject of this post: Tea and Trouble Brewing.  Buy it, read it, and be inspired and entertained.