Category: Connection

Hand-made and Heart-felt: my companion coffee mug

On By ednafroeseIn Connection, gifts, reflection, writingLeave a comment

            The gift was given so long ago that I cannot name the day or the occasion. I do remember the giver and something about the maker. I was in my early 20s. The giver was my brother, and the maker was a friend of his, an older woman. She was a kindly potter who understood many things—that I learned later through hearsay, for I remember meeting her only once, in her studio. Perhaps, though, I have only imagined that meeting.

photo of the mug, a small plate with a muffin, a magazine, a linen napkin, and reading glasses.

            The mug was not notable for its beauty, for it was squat and brownish. In those days, had it been left to my choice, I’d have picked something more elegant, like a Blue Mountain pottery piece, then much in vogue and now found only in thrift shops and on collectors’ shelves. What I did notice at once was how the mug felt in my hands. It belonged there – completely. Something about the shape suited my hands, fit the pattern of my holding. I soon discovered that its shape also kept the coffee hot longer, something that mattered to me then already. My coffee addiction developed early.

 In the first years we had together, my mug and I spent many hours in university classrooms. I remember plunking the empty mug in the bottom of my capacious book bag which I schlepped to campus day after day. The mug came with me because I had been inducted, in my second undergraduate year, into the pleasure of long seminar classes. My first one (on Shakespeare) always began with the professor’s ritual of plugging in an electric kettle to begin the process of making coffee, then asking a few “questions to boil water by.” (Yes, it was instant coffee, brand now forgotten – I was addicted to coffee but not yet choosy about what kind.)  Once the coffee had been made, we settled down to work on the serious questions for the day.

 No doubt, the mug was used often in later years, post-university, when babies came to complete our family and transform us from carefree twenty-somethings into responsible thirty-somethings, preoccupied with the weight of parenting and church involvement and bills and house-owning. I have no clear visual memories of the mug during those years, although I am certain that I would have used it regularly. It had been a comfortable (and comforting) companion from the beginning of its days with me. That would not have changed regardless of how busy and distracted I might have been.

 Then came the days of teaching, with an interlude of further graduate studies, and then teaching again – until eventual retirement. My first “offices” on campus were miniscule and temporary. Embedded in my memory are long days of solitude in a tiny carrel in the library, cherished because it had a door and a lock. That meant that I could leave books there, of course, but more importantly, my typewriter (remember those??) and my coffee mug. To this day, sentences flow more easily when my favourite mug sits at hand.

            After I gained a more permanent office in the gracious spaces of St. Thomas More College, where I taught for 19 years, my warm brown mug lived in my office.

photo of my office in STM College. The mug is visible on the desk, and in the background are many books on shelves and a computer monitor.

It came with me to the various classrooms I taught in. Often the coffee was barely lukewarm by the end of the class, and little of it had actually been consumed. What mattered was that I had it in my hand or nearby on the desk. I was convinced that I was then more relaxed and that my students participated more readily in the kinds of discussion on good literature that gave me the “teaching highs” I valued so much.  Perhaps even now, more than 12 years since my retirement, former students remember me with coffee mug in hand. I rather hope so.

These days, that mug, now over 50 years old, lives only in our home. I guard it carefully when we have houseguests, lest it find itself in strange hands. Silly, isn’t it? Surely a mug knows nothing of whose hands fit around its inviting shape. And a washed mug is always ready for the next use by whoever picks it up. But we have a relationship, I insist. It’s so close a tie that even my liking for a particular travel mug that I have now used for some 15 years doesn’t rival it.  

  Its particular virtues? I think the circumstances of its making, in a small pottery studio in a garage of a suburban home in Edmonton, are important. The potter was a gentle woman, an artist, aware of the aches of living, aware of the frequent unfairnesses that hide in the best of places. She did her work with love, that’s certain. Each mug, each piece of pottery was made for its unique self. In the words of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, my mug had its unique, living character, had its “inscape” from the beginning, and all the various stages of life that it has shared with me have only deepened that “inscape.”  

 Some day, one of our children will have to decide what becomes of that mug. Having survived so many years already, still uncracked and unchipped, despite an occasional fall to the floor, it is unlikely that it will ever be broken, certainly not by me.  

As I ponder its long life—and it is now so imbued with coffee flavors that it cannot be used for tea or hot chocolate or water—I recognize that it has given me one other pleasure: a lifelong appreciation for good pottery. When we travel, we are apt to find small galleries and craft markets (both indoors and outdoors) where we peruse the handmade items, and think about the love with which the items have been made. We have a small collection of handmade pottery mugs now, so that we can share our pleasure with family and guests.

            This Christmas I will once again dunk my homemade peppernuts into my coffee, served always in the perfect mug.  It was made in love, given in love, received gratefully with love.

Photo of the same kitchen table, with the mug now more prominent. Beside is a small bowl full of peppernut cookies,, a napkin, and teapot.
That is a teapot, yes, indeed. It happens to be more photogenic than any coffee pot that I own. Believe me, there is no tea in the beloved mug.

A Christmas Wish List for My Readers

On By ednafroeseIn Beauty, Christmas, Connection, Forgiveness, possibilityLeave a comment

Writing a blog, which I’ve done for almost four years now, is a lonely affair. I’m not complaining, since writing is almost always a lonely pursuit. Every now and then, though, I do think more particularly about my readers and try to imagine where you might live, or what we might talk about if we could have coffee together someplace interesting–in your country or mine.

Writing about Christmas is an additional challenge because of all the designated holidays that I am familiar with, this one has been written about and sung about and indulged in and celebrated more than any other. Surely everything that can be said about Christmas, concerning whichever grand narrative you choose to focus on, has been said – many times over. A wish list, on the other, can be new every year.

Unfortunately, these days the world seems locked into so many conflicts and stupid flirtations with apocalyptic scenarios that the very act of creating a wish list seems frivolous. One could, of course, go big and like one of my grandchildren, add to the list “the moon.” Why not? Why not ask for the utterly unlikely, such as world peace?

Instead, I will retreat as I often do to the small things, for they matter more than we think: it is out of little actions that our habits of mind are formed, and it is out of our habits of mind that we make the big decisions and the crucial speeches that can change the world. Well, our own small spheres at least.

So, the list:

At least once, in the days before and after Christmas, I wish for you the time to watch an entire sunrise, preferably in a place without street lights and power lines. In my part of the world, the days are very short now, and the sun rises after breakfast, as it were. Take a cup of coffee or cocoa with you and watch the subtle first hints of color transform themselves into a blaze of glory. It is always a miracle, especially when the nights have been long and dark.

I wish for you two uninterrupted hours or more in which to curl up in a comfy chair or wide window seat where you can let yourself become utterly absorbed in a good novel. Preferably a classic or a young adult book that will bring you into a world that has a stable moral centre and in which a happy ending can be anticipated.

I wish for you many warm hugs and I-love-you’s. There might be gifts involved as well, but they aren’t that necessary, are they?

I hope that in your home, your office, your favorite hang-out, there are flowering plants. In my world, that’s most likely to be poinsettias, but maybe you’ll be lucky enough to be near a spectacular amaryllis in full bloom. Or maybe where you live, there are gorgeous flowering shrubs outdoors. Let there be someplace where you can smell the earth and savor the complexity of petals with their heavenly tints.

And this last wish might seem perverse or more like an admonition than a wish: I hope that there is at least one opportunity for a phone call or an in-person meeting in which you can say, “I’m sorry,” and be heard and still feel safe. We are none of us faultless. Without a doubt, there are individuals who need to hear an apology that will open up possibilities for better understanding. Christmas inevitably contains some tough stuff; it’s the fall-out, I suspect, from over-wrought expectations of all sorts. I wish for you one interval of time, however brief, in which hope can arise and love increase.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

A Line Runs Through

On By ednafroeseIn Connection, family, LoveLeave a comment

The last academic conference that I attended—Congress of Social Sciences and Humanities 2011—was held at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB. My husband had traveled with me this time, a few days before the conference began, so we could have a short holiday before I settled in to listen to many academics demonstrate their prowess with words and ideas.

            We visited the Hopewell Rocks, which we had been told many times we “absolutely had to see.” For land-locked prairie dwellers whose typical holiday was hiking in the Rockies, the mud flats of low tide, stretching endlessly toward the sky, were astonishing all on their own, never mind the mud-and-rock sculptures shaped by the tide, in its back-and-forthing for millenia. They were huge; they were grotesque and majestic all at the same time. Some were named: “Bear,” “Elephant,” “Dinosaur.” We were awed almost as much by the vast quantities of seaweed heaped up and sprawled everywhere. The mud itself had an enticing silky smoothness; I wanted to keep touching it.  

            Eventually, exhausted by sensory overload, we sat down on a clean rock to have some lunch. My gaze shifted down and inward. There is rest in mindful attention to detail. I had begun to appreciate still life photography, thanks to regular visits to Shawna Lemay’s blog Calm Things, which preceded her current blog Transactions with Beauty. I was learning to delight in small things, calm things, gentle juxtapositions, artful compositions. I was beginning to notice shades of color, textures, and lines, sometimes as subtle and beautiful and complex as anything I traced through novels and poems in my classrooms. So here, on a smooth rock in the midst of the ungainly, preposterous Hopewell Rocks, I assembled one small rock and half a kiwi, next to the line through which life was persistently growing.  

            My interest in Mennonite literature, which eventually became my PhD dissertation, began back in the early 1960s when I was in high school, when our small town’s comfortable insularity and piety was disturbed by the grandfather of Canadian Mennonite literature, Rudy Wiebe. His first novel (begun as an MA thesis) Peace Shall Destroy Many (1962) was the first novel in English by a Mennonite writer, and its realistic presentation of Mennonite life, with its hard work, godliness, pacifism, prejudice, and hypocrisy caused consternation among Mennonite congregations across Canada. That’s by way of backstory.

Wiebe subsequently became a major figure in Canadian literature; his best-known novels—Wiebe earned his first Governor General’s Award for fiction with The Temptations of Big Bear 1973—concern Indigenous peoples. He also wrote several novels with Mennonite characters at the centre, the last of which is Sweeter Than All the World (2001).

Photo of a book shelf, holding many of Rudy Wiebe's books. The prominent titles are Stolen Life, My Lovely Enemy, The Temptations of Big Bear, A Discovery of Strangers,, and Sweeter Than All the World.

            It was vintage Rudy Wiebe: a cast of unforgettable characters that spanned the entire history of Mennonites beginning in the 1500s; a central character struggling to make sense of his personal history and his inherited theology; a demanding, thick and powerful prose style that packed clauses within clauses in a breathless avalanche of thought and sensation, thus demanding close attention and several rereadings; and a network of metaphors that knit together not only various plot elements and characters in Sweeter Than All the World but also key themes explored in his previous Mennonite novels. I became aware of those latter connections only as I was working on a conference paper on STAW. As I unravelled and rewove those intertwined images, my heart strings were tugged so often that my writing repeatedly snagged to a halt in the midst of family memories of my own. Our worlds are not that far apart; his Mennonite novels lay bare my world, too.

Sweeter Than All the World may be difficult for non-Mennonites to get through. It takes a certain kind of awareness of both community solidarity and shared family histories of broken family connections to persevere through Wiebe’s seemingly fragmented story lines, so filled with suffering and loss. In the end, though, the fragmentation is undone, as much as it can ever be, by lines: threads of continuity, melodic lines of song, genealogical cords, pulleys and cables, all bound together by crucial sticking points (both those that hold—needles and poles—and those that hurt—knives), seemingly rooted in the earth. Call it grounded community, if you will, unsentimental, essential.

Fiction lets us enter other worlds, try on other identities, evaluate other values. It is thus that we learn compassion – through narrative imagination. Sometimes, too, fiction lets us see ourselves from another angle, from which we can test the strength of our personal connecting lines that let us grow.