Unlike many of my first cousins, I don’t speak Pennsylvania Dutch, but I know enough to know that we spent the weekend with freundschaft (relatives).
Ben and I didn’t get a chance to cook together, but reconnecting with cousins I haven’t seen for ages gave me the opportunity to reflect on family and identity. One group conversation that I will continue to ponder is what we gain and what we lose by assimilating into America’s mainstream.
For the first 8 years of my life, I went by my middle name, Anne, because both my grandmothers were Elizabeth (Lizzie). Thus, I was greeted by my cousins as Anne at the reunion, because that is how they remember me. I find it somewhat amusing that most women change their last name when they grow up and get married, but I did the reverse in keeping my last name and changing my first name. Had I followed the “normal” path, I guess I would be Anne Sprunger. (Is this how a Mennonite Witness Protection program would work?) I actually found it reassuring to be called Anne because it took me back to a time when I was forming my ideas about the world, and those who populated mine.
I loved hearing old, old stories revived, like how my grandparents’ move to Iowa hit the community like a tidal wave. Their stern, legalistic Amish bishop tried endlessly to nitpick the smallest aspects of daily life, insisting once, that my aunts’ aprons (the part that goes over the bodice of an Amish dress) should not have rounded corners. It’s probably even funnier in Pennsylvania Dutch, but my grandma, when confronted by the bishop’s wife, just mused, “Round corners… round corners… I wonder what a round corner would look like?”
In interacting with this four-generation crew for the weekend, I was struck, not by the diversity you would expect in this large a clan, but by the commonalities. Though my grandmother only finished the “sixth reader” herself, she instilled a love of learning and reading in her children, a trait that continues expressing itself throughout each new generation. There is a shared commitment to faith, peace and social justice issues; an inclination to back the underdog. And oh, can this group sing! To hear familiar hymns sung from memory, unaccompanied, in four part harmony was very moving, to say the least.
To have freundschaft is to understand your value as a thread in a much larger, stronger, more enduring fabric. For Ben, it is one more place to belong.