By Pam Mellskog
A story I heard about strawberries came to mind last week in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
For 29 years it just rested in my bread box — my collection of mental notes about stories that nourish and heal. But I knew it was in there. I also knew that like every story I stash, finding it would refresh my trust in this — that possibilities play out around our humanity as surely as difficulties do in Ukraine and everywhere, during war and peace.
Over time, these bread box stories have emerged almost as a brand for how consistently each one has taken me by surprise; revealed something wholesome and true through words and deeds; and happened in under five minutes.
Two recent examples of these bread box stories stand out from last October when I visited my parents with our youngest son, Ray, then 11, who had homeschool flexibility then.
The first materialized as I glanced out the living room windows at my parents’ home in rural Galena, Ill. One of my teenage nieces had crouched in the mud and stayed there to soothe Gussy Girl — our family’s cherished pasture ornament. Then, as the farrier trimmed and filed each back hoof, C.J. leaned against the rickety pony to steady her.
This scene would be Gussy’s last fight for balance, her last farrier visit before her death later that fall after a freakishly long life. But this story keeps coming to mind as a picture of what unassuming power up caring looks like in a world of power down dominance.
I am verklempt as I type.
Another bread box story popped up later that month at the church of my childhood and youth — First Presbyterian Church on Bench Street in downtown Galena. The sturdy, chiseled stone building finished in 1838 is the oldest continuously used church building of any denomination in the Old Northwest Territory that covers a five-state region today.
After the last Sunday service we attended before driving home to Colorado, our pastor invited our youngest son, Ray, then 11, to ring the heavy steeple bell as the congregation disbanded.
The Rev. Jim McCrea, someone I have known for decades, gave Ray a quick, impromptu tutorial on how to pull the thick rope and swing the bell with vigor — to sound out the joyful transition underway as people inside leave one holy space for another outside.
Sunshine poured over Ray’s young face then as the old bell swung overhead. And some glory filled the foyer that morning for me after witnessing someone in charge giving someone not in charge an invitation to bring it on!
But I digress while digging for the strawberry story, one I gleaned as I sat alone and emotionally drained in the shadowy, empty holds of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
It had been a long day of wandering through the museum with a press pass before it opened to the public in April 1993.
In one small, narrow room I plodded across a low bridge over a floor filled several feet deep with old shoes of every size salvaged from the death camps after the war.
This exhibit and many others helped reporters like me and future visitors better imagine a person, not just a people, undone by war.
So, by the time I got to the small theater featuring brief videotaped interviews with Holocaust survivors, one elderly woman’s face — about 3 feet tall onscreen — felt like a reversal on that theme. As she spoke about strawberries, her enduring tender kindness and capacity for friendship bubbled up through time like a secret spring as I sat on a bench in the dark, deserted room.
I looked up at her face and listened for the next three minutes as she retold a tiny account from time spent during her youth in a concentration camp.
As her friend there showed signs of slipping away in the spring of 1945, she reached back to a carefree time before the war when they picked strawberries and enjoyed the fresh, ripe fruit together on a fine summer’s day.
Ultimately, her ill friend passed away just before the Allies liberated their camp that April. But until then, the speaker shared the strawberry story whenever she sensed the other’s need for high regard, encouragement, and grounding in goodness.
So, I have carried it — minus some now forgotten details about the camp name and their exact ages — as an example of how one woman captured the ordinary beauty of our humanity as a balm for her sick and brokenhearted friend.
It is a bread box story to remind me that war cannot suppress our best — something championed by Anne Frank, a 15-year-old, Jewish teenager, in her namesake diary and war classic published posthumously first in 1947: “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
Pam Mellskog can be reached at p.mellskog@gmail.com or 303-746-0942. For more stories and photos, please visit https://www.timescall.com/tag/mommy-musings/.
The Link LonkMarch 05, 2022 at 08:52PM
https://www.timescall.com/2022/03/05/mommy-musings-bread-box-stories-for-hard-times
Mommy Musings: Bread box stories for hard times - Longmont Times-Call
https://news.google.com/search?q=hard&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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