Carla Funk - Mennonite Valley Girl: A Wayward Coming of Age

Copyright 2021 by Carla Funk

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Greystone Books Ltd.

greystonebooks.com

Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

ISBN 978-1-77164-515-7 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-77164-516-4 (epub)

Editing by Paula Ayer

Proofreading by Doretta Lau

Jacket and text design by Jessica Sullivan

Jacket illustrations by Lana Smirnova (jeans); milart (birds);

Oswald Kunstmann (embroidery) / Shutterstock

Author photo by Lance Hesketh

Printed in Canada on FSC certified paper at Friesens. The FSC label means that materials used for the product have been responsibly sourced.

Greystone Books gratefully acknowledges the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples on whose land our office is located.

Greystone Books thanks the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, and the Government of Canada for supporting our publishing activities.

For every female in the family, far and wide

&

For Soopie and Sindee, my fellow Valley gals

Why do you boast in the valleys, Your flowing valley, O backsliding daughter?

JEREMIAH 49:4A

WRITING A MEMOIR is a little like Testimony Sunday. Every so often, in the church of my childhood, the preacher would invite folks to come forward and give a testimony. Eventually, after a long and awkward silence, someone would walk slowly to the front of the sanctuary, stand at the microphone, and start to testify. The one who spoke might share a few words meant to bless or give thanks, or a praise report of a minor miracle occurring in our midst. Sometimes, the person told a true and simple story, confessing weakness, doubt, or the missing of the mark. Those sitting in the pews might whisper to each other, Here she goes again, or Thats not what I heard happened, or What must her poor mother think? Those listening might shift in their seats as they found their own stories flashing back to them. Yes, the one giving testimony likely changed some names and altered some identifying details, to shield others from shame. She most certainly didnt tell the whole story, because some parts just werent meant to be laid bare. Memory, like the heart, is prone to wander and full of flaws. But to tell the story with love and honestythats the hope, and to point toward a bigger, higher, wilder story that illuminates the valleys we pass through and the shadows that follow us, as we stumble our way out into the light.

AS SOON AS THE SUMMER SKY deepened into dusk, we huddled in a circle and set the rules for the night. From the far side of the yard to where the driveway met the asphalt, from the pigpen to the tree fort, but not beyond the lagoon, and only to the treeline, our boundaries fell into place, marking out the limits for our game. Home base was where we started, gathered to the garage lights glow. On a patch of gravel flanked by flowerbeds, we stoodmy brother and a straggle of boys from down the road, and me and the girls from the house next door. Above our heads, a windchime silvered the air, and around our ankles, the cat wove and wound its tail.

Whos gonna be It? my brother said. No one volunteered, and so we made our fists and held them to the center of our circle, ready for the choosing.

One potato, two potato, or Eeny, meeny, miny, mo, or Engine, engine, number nine, going down to Chicago Line, which the boys seemed to like best because it threatened with a train going off the tracks. The one who spoke the rhyme counted off the words until a final fist was landed on, and an It was picked.

Ita snitch of a wordheld everything we didnt know but wanted to. In a single syllable, all the hidden secrets of the universe distilled, and all our future knowledge waited to be found. Did you see it? Did you hear about it? She did it. He did it. They did it. Its true. It was the nutshell of our innocence and our hunger for experience. It named the shape of darkness, but not what cast the shadow.

Youre It, my brother said. He handed me the flashlight, which was the only consolation. The one who held the light, held power. To sweep the beam across a blackened panorama and find a flicker in the trees, an eyeballs shine, the neon of a shoelace, or the glint of metal bracing someones smilethat was the mission.

I shut my eyes and started counting to one hundred, calling the numbers with a breath between each one, two, three, four, giving time for everyone to scatter. Though we were old enough to stay awake past dark, past when our parents went to sleep, we turned into children all over again as soon as the game began. Hollering and running through the trees, wielding sticks by moonlight, yelling curses at each other, and laughing across the acres, we could have been kids with our T-shirts whipped off, barefoot, flying wild. But now we ran with a different voltage humming in our blood, a current that sizzled in the company of other bodies. The boys were fleet and lean, all muscle and energy. They launched up trees and laddered the branches to enviable heights, while we girls stayed lower to the ground, taught to be careful in our climbing.

Ready or not, here I come, I called into the night. I flicked on the flashlight.

When I was a child, the whole earth was filled with glory. Even a slug, sluicing a path of slime across the greenhouse glass, was a marvel to behold. The how and why of awe and curiosity fueled my thinking. I looked at the sky and wanted to know the names of what shone in it. I crouched to the dirt and studied weeds. I plucked the delicate tubes from the stalks of Indian paintbrush, sucked the nectars from their tips, and tasted the candy of what grew wild in my own backyard.

But as the body grows up farther from the ground, so the shadow lengthens. Wonder, with its soft underbelly, retreats. It goes into hiding, hushes in the dark, until the faith of childhood sounds more like a scoff than a song. The light-filled eye that scanned the dust for gold turns inward. Heats up. The body, that original house of wonder, warps and swells, holding what waits to be revealed.