Written a while back…
I’ve never lived in a place with a cornfield out my back
yard. I take that back. I’ve lived where the cornfield walked right up to the
front door and surrounded the house, back in Yuvinani, but there I did not live
with the farmers in the house.
It’s 5 am, and I hear Host Dad Larry
up already, checking something in the office overhead before heading out to
plant his last acres with white beans. The cornfield outside my back window is
planted, but you can’t tell because it’s no-till. I learned this. Larry
knows the winds and the rains and adjusts his work to the weather. I’ve never
lived in a household where what you do depends on winds and rains. I take that
back. I’ve lived where winds and rains cancel flights and raise rivers and
close down roads, so loved ones can’t get home, but not where coming in for
lunch depends on whether the winds have shifted.
Hostess Marg will be up later, managing the household. There
are three Sisters in and out of the home still, making me miss my kids, and Brother
Ben, who lives in grandma and grampa’s old house across the street, and Brother
Jamie Engineer, who is married and lives just around the bend in the opposite
direction in our town of ten houses. His wife is my Home Nurse Becky, who
rescues me from getting shots from (ex) pig farmers. When she goes to work, she
drops off her two kids with Gramma: Joshie, who is two and can name any farm
implement on the place and has ridden them all, and loves Gramma’s homemade
pickles, and Rachie, who when Josh turns to her and hugs her forehead, beams
like heaven. Rachie can outeat anyone at the table. And when she gets fussy,
Larry picks her up and takes her to the piano in the office and sits her down
for a musical romp, all improv, until she quiets. This is a man of hidden
talents.
The girls are artists. Kendra, who just graduated from
Wilfred Laurier Univeristy as a singer of operas, wanders the house singing, a
nightingale on the loose. Katie is a professional seamstress, learning to sew
up costumes from any period, and this summer, she is making shrouds for premature babies
out of wedding dresses that make my heart twinge. Emily creates sets for plays. She helped create a set
for a play in an old school, bought just for the occasion, where characters
were acting their parts in every room
and even in closets so that you had to choose who to follow and had to buy
tickets for next nights to see more of the action. Oh, create such a set here!
I want to see this play!
And Brother Ben knows stuff about all the cars ever made,
and he holds barbeques at his house, and he takes Joshie out on tractors,
because he, too, is a farmer, and plying the trade. He walks down the stairs
when he comes over, and visits us. And that is what makes this family an
Honorary Latin Family. They take in guests without batting an eye. There are adjustments
as there always are between cultures, but this family has a knack of
hospitality, a willingness to open up the door to strays. And Mexico, with its
insistent “mi casa es tu casa,” seems just that much closer.
Now, as Elai and Mikael are gone, and we have moved to a new
place, an in-law apartment attached to the house of friends, with train tracks
rather than corn rows at the edge of the back yard, we will miss the pickles
and plum jam and platz, and the daily news of the farm, and the bustle of five kids plus grandkids coming in
and out, where there is always someone around doing something interesting
(after staying with them, Elai says she wants a big family because it's more fun!). So when you visit
us now, it won’t be as interesting or as flavorful, but still, “mi casa es tu
casa” still holds.
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