Darla Weaver shares a year in the life of her Old Order Mennonite Family
Author of Gathering of Sisters
Once
a week Darla Weaver hitches up her
spirited mare, bundles her children into the buggy, and drives six miles to the
farm where she grew up. There she gathers with her four sisters and their
children for a day with their mother. In Gathering of Sisters: A Year with My Old
Order Mennonite Family (Herald
Press), Weaver writes about her horse-and-buggy Mennonite family and the weekly
women’s gatherings that keep them connected. On warm days, the children play
and fish and build houses of hay in the barn. In the winter, everyone stays
close to the woodstove, with puzzles and games and crocheting. No matter the
weather, the Tuesday get-togethers of this Old Order Mennonite family keep them
grounded and centered in their love for God and for each other, even when
raising an occasional loving but knowing eyebrow at each other.
Over
the twelve chapters of the book, Weaver shares the activities and time spent
together spread over the twelve months of the year. Together the sisters cook,
laugh over cooking disasters, share in the sewing, work in the gardens, swap
books, work puzzles together and enjoy time as a family. She even shares some
tried and true family recipes that didn’t “flop.” The rest of the week is full of laundry, and
errands, and work that never ends. But Tuesday is about being sisters,
daughters, and mothers.
Q: Gathering of Sisters tells about getting
together weekly with your mother and sisters. Tell us a little bit about your
family.
There were five of us sisters, growing up together with our
four little brothers in the white farmhouse our parents built. The nine of us
kept this five-bedroom house brimming with life, and crowded with both
happiness and some inevitable sadness. We did a lot of living and a lot of
learning in that house.
And then we all grew up.
I was the first to leave. On a warm and sunshiny day in
September 2000, after the leaves on the lofty silver maples had faded from
summer-green and before they wore brightly flaming autumn shades, I was married
to Laverne Weaver. It was the first wedding in that mellowing white house we
all called home. Four more were to follow in the next several years. Except for
my youngest brother, we’ve all left home. Most of us live close, but one
brother lives in Alaska.
Q: Why did
you decide to make an effort to get together once a week?
That left
Tuesdays. Tuesday really was the perfect in-between sort of day to spend with
Mom and my sisters. On Tuesday the five us sisters still come home. We pack up
the children—all eighteen of them during summer vacation—and head to the farm.
We go
early. I drive my spirited little mare, Charlotte, and she trots briskly along
the six miles of winding country roads. Regina and Ida Mae live much closer.
They married brothers, and their homes are directly across the fields from Dad
and Mom’s farm. They usually bike, with children’s noses pressed against the
bright mesh of the carts they tow behind their bicycles. Or they walk, pushing
strollers over the back fields and up the lane. And Emily and Amanda, who also
married brothers and live in neighboring houses about five miles away, come
together with everyone crammed into one carriage.
Q: Do all
the kids enjoy Tuesdays as well?
The children love Tuesdays. On warm days they play on the
slide and the swings in the cool shade of the silver maples, jump on the
trampoline, run through their grandpa’s three greenhouses, ride along on the
wagon going to the fields where produce by the bushels and bins is hauled to
the packing shed. They build hay houses in the barn and explore the creek. The
boys take poles and hooks and bait and spend hours fishing and playing in the
small creek that flows beneath the lane and through the thickets beside the
pasture fence. They catch dozens of tiny blue gills and northern creek chubbs,
most of which they release back into the water hole, a deep pool that yawns at
the mouth of a large culvert, to be caught again next week. They work too, at
mowing lawn, raking, lugging flower pots around, or anything else that Grandma
needs them to do, but most often Tuesdays on Grandpa’s farm are play days.
Q: What do
you do when you are all gathered together?
Every day
is different, yet every Tuesday follows a predictable pattern that varies with
the seasons. Winter finds us inside, close to the
warmth humming from the woodstove, absorbed in wintertime pursuits which
include card-making, crocheting, sewing, puzzles—jigsaw, crossword, sudoku—and
reading books and magazines. But as soon as spring colors the buds of the
maples with a reddish tinge, we spend more time outside. The greenhouses are
loaded with plants, the flowerbeds full of unfurling perennials, and the grass
is greening in the yard again.
In summer, while the garden and fields burst with produce,
the breezy shade of the front porch calls. It wraps around two sides of the
house and is full of Mom’s potted plants and porch furniture. We sit there to
shell peas, husk corn, or just sip a cold drink and cool off after a warm
stroll through the flowers.
Then autumn echoes through the country, the leaves flame and
fall, and we rake them up—millions of leaves. Where we rake one Tuesday is
covered again by the next, until at last the towering maples stand disrobed of
leaves, their amazing seventy-foot branches a wavering fretwork against a sky
that is sullen with winter once more.
Q: How did
your sisters react to the news about you writing this book?
The initial
reactions varied.
“I suppose
you would change all our names,” Mom said after a while.
That was a
new thought for me, and one I didn’t want to consider. “Oh, no, that would be
much too hard. We would just use every one’s real name.” Merely the thought of
renaming eighteen children exhausted me.
“Oh, yes, I
won’t write anything you wouldn’t like,” I promised.
“She will
still have to claim us as sisters,” Regina points out, as usual finding a
positive angle to the topic. “She won’t make us sound too odd or ornery or
anything.”
Regina’s
oldest daughter, Jerelyn, who at fourteen has graduated from eighth grade and
is again spending Tuesdays with us, considered staying home for the entire next
year to keep her name out of the book. But on a whole, no one really objected.
Like Laverne and our children, Mom and my sisters are almost used to my
compulsive scribbling. Almost.
About the Author
Darla
Weaver is a homemaker,
gardener, writer and Old Order Mennonite living in the hills of southern Ohio.
She is the author of Water My Soul, Many Lighted Windows and Gathering of Sisters. Weaver has written for Family Life, Ladies Journal, Young Companion, and other magazines for Amish and Old Order Mennonite
groups. Before her three children were born she also taught school. Her hobbies
are gardening and writing.
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