Tag Archives: Midwest

Jello Molds and Midwestern Womanhood

25 Wednesday Feb 2015

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I made my first jello mold over the weekend. And it was beautiful: a strawberry gelatin filled with fresh blueberries and elegantly rounded by a 1950s bundt pan. In forty minutes, the gel, whose main ingredient was xanthan gum, (believe me, no horses were harmed in the making of this chilled salad) congealed and agreeably slipped out of the metal pan and onto a waiting china plate (English, of course).

There it was, in all its scalloped glory, free from the confines of the bundt pan, gently wobbling on my kitchen table. Watching it dulcetly wiggle gave me an odd feeling—though this was the first time I’ve made a jello mold, this crafting of gelatin salads is a tradition much older than me. It is a foodstuff straight out of my Midwestern childhood. Molded salads, made by my mother and grandmothers and great-grandmothers, wriggled through my recollection of every family dinner. The women of my family served jello molds on china plates and out of sensible plastic Tupperware. They used colorful powders, tasting of strawberries, cherries, and limes, to flavor the base, and filled each wobbly delight with canned fruit, Cool Whip (giving the gel a mysterious cloudy color), and sometimes, marshmallows.

This molded dish signified comfortable wealth in my family, especially for my great-grandmothers and their mothers. To present your guests with a gelatin salad meant that your husband made enough money to purchase a sizeable icebox, and then a refrigerator,when those became popular at the turn of the century. And for my grandmothers and mother, it represented an unofficial passage into womanhood. If you made a jello mold, it signified that you were having dinner parties, which meant that you were a hostess, a married woman, a wife, a mother.

Maybe that’s why staring at the mold gave me such an odd feeling. Making a jello mold signified Midwestern Womanhood, and the only marker of that state I currently display is that of a hostess. Perhaps my subconscious, shaped by Midwestern upper-middle class values, got really confused. What was I doing? How dare I make my first jello mold without a ring on my left hand and children running about! I was clearly messing with the order of things. This is simply not how it’s done.

But, if I bewildered my subconscious, my immediate cognitive thought patterns didn’t seem to mind. In fact, they were elated. Here I was, admiring my first jello mold, which I got to make on my own terms. I earn enough money, doing things that I love to do, to afford a refrigerator. I host parties and extend hospitality at my discretion. And, I didn’t have to wait for a husband and children to mold me into an adult woman. I have the wonderful and scary privilege of doing that on my own, accompanied by beloveds of my choosing, who see me as a library director, a writer, and a reasonably lovely person, not just as a body who will run one’s household and have one’s children and fit a certain beauty aesthetic.

I reach out and gently poke the jello mold. It dances beneath my touch. I roll my eyes. We sometimes see ourselves in the strangest of things, and now I see myself in this round of strawberry gel. Our pasts were molded by unyielding shapes that confined and controlled, but, we both have willingly slipped away from those molds. Though our past structures still give us our basic form, we take that form and move it, wriggle it, just as we like. And that wriggling is glorious. It gives life. It gives permission to do things differently—-like making your first jello mold whenever you bloody well want to.

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Urban Snowstorms and Sweet Ohio Red Wine

28 Wednesday Jan 2015

Posted by in Pushpins (Daily Life), The Creative Life

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The snow swirls and curls outside the window, I cock my head and watch it gracefully move in the late afternoon sun. Its presence is soft, muted, and gentle as it winnows through the straight streets and tall buildings of New York’s Upper East Side. By tomorrow morning, the city will be covered in a deep snow.

Being from the Snow Belt of Northeastern Ohio, snow is a winter inevitability—its manifestation involving salted roads and large expanses of forest and farmland, covered in a cold sea of solid white. But this is my first urban snowstorm. The first time I’ll seen snow embrace the busy, lived-in world of a big city.

I look away from the window and back to the laptop that sits on my lap. On a small side table to my left, is a hot cup of tea, Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth, and a glass of sweet Ohio red wine. I always bring back a few bottles of sweet Ohio red wine when I visit my family in the Midwest. I’ve yet to find a red wine that matches its tasty contradictions: light-bodied but rich, delicately sweet but sensuously grounded. But at this moment, I enjoy not for its contradictions, but for the sense of consistency its ruby presence gives me. Though buildings rather than trees tower outside my window, my snow rituals haven’t changed that much. In Northeastern Ohio, I too would weather out a snowy afternoon with a cup of tea, a good book, an interesting writing project, and a glass of sweet Ohio red wine.

Inspired, I hold my glass up to the window and absently swirl around its contents. The wine seems to be dancing with the snow. What a mismatched couple they seem to make:  Red and white, liquid and solid, town and country, all moving before my eyes. But are they really so poorly matched? For even in contradiction there is consistency. Won’t this snow melt, evaporate, and rain down upon the vineyards of the Hudson Valley, or even those of Northeastern Ohio, depending on the weather patterns? Won’t future clusters of grapes benefit from this snow’s liquid nurturance, and swell full of flavor and life? And won’t a Midwestern girl enjoy an afternoon of snow, even if her landscape is tall, squared buildings rather than expansive, rolling farmland?

The answer is yes, for even in contradiction there is consistency.

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An Old Orchard and a New Year

31 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by in Gardening, Pushpins (Daily Life), Romantic Botany, The Creative Life

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My nose is cold, but every other part of my body is hot and sweaty. Morning runs in the winter-touched, Midwestern countryside will do that to you. With hands on my hips, I turn around and look back at my grandmother’s property. An apple orchard stands at attention on my right and on my left, creating a passageway of arching limbs. These trees were the guardians of my childhood. I played among them, hide behind them, and once, in a fit of teenage romanticism, longed to get married under them. They were already old when I was young, planted by turn of the century hands. Their roots have had a hundred years to expand and grow and thrive, embraced by the rich Ohio soil. And steadily anchored, their limbs, weathered and withered, reach out to one another and to the sky, touched by a century’s worth of wind and rain and sun. Sometimes, the touch was hash, and the grass between the two rows became a no man’s land of branches and bark.

In spite of such losses, they still stand, their branches stretching out before them, towards each other and to the sky. Receptive of whatever the elements will give them next. Yes, they lost branches and bark, and will most likely lose them again. But, they have roots, made strong by the years and the soil that nourishes them.

Twenty-nine is young, at least, that is what my older friends tell me. Yet twenty-nine doesn’t feel young to me. I’ve lived enough of life to know loss—the loss of a parent, of a self, of a significant other, of a much coveted career, of a best friend. And like a harsh wind tearing away a tree branch, the loss strips you, exposing you to the elements in new, unforeseen ways. There is pain and fear in that experience, but there is also power. For the exposed place becomes a surface of possibility. If your roots are deep and the soil you place yourself in is rich, new bark will grow, and your branches will once more reach out to others and to the world.

I do not feel old because I have suffered loss, I feel old because I have seen the other side of loss. That in its wake, come new possibilities and new chances to love. Loss levels, but after all is stripped away, you have the choice to create again. Perhaps that is my hope for you and for me in the New Year: that we become more like these trees, quietly standing to my left and to my right. Rooted in who we are so that we can be open to what we will become.

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French Fries, Fear, and Pigs

08 Wednesday Oct 2014

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“So, who wants to feed the pig?”

I look around, my brother is already back with the horses. And my friend, who runs the farm I am currently spending time at, has important paperwork-like things to do. Slowly, I breath out.

“I guess I will.”

I take the white Styrofoam carryout box, containing the leftover French fries from our lunch plates, and make my way to a small barn. On its threshold, I unlatch the main stall gate and enter a world incensed by animal musk and sweet straw.

“Hey guys.”

I nod to an unblinking Alpine goat. When I turn to close the gate behind me, a grey haired donkey nuzzles my hip. With my free hand, I stroke his mane, tufted and wild.

“Sorry love, this isn’t for you.”

I pass by the goat and the friendly donkey, slipping between an iron gate and a wooden stall. I hear a delighted squeal and feel an eager prodding at my ankles. Taking another deep breath, I look down.

“Hey Lola, I’ve got something for you.”

She prods at my ankle again and I flinch. Her touch is concentrated and hard. I hope that I don’t bruise. Why did I agree to feed the pig? I’m afraid of pigs.

I first discovered this fear in college, during a spring break trip to a Heifer Project farm outside of Boston. The farm had two large hogs, who would eat everything from donuts to vegetables, and those two large hogs needed to go to the butcher’s. My classmates and I stood in two lines from pen to truck, behind thick boards that we fortified with our body weight. We hoped that the hogs would go quietly, but if they didn’t, only our body weight on the boards would keep the hogs from getting away—and us, from being trampled.

Shaking behind the board I braced, I realized that I was afraid. Pigs have a low center of gravity, are usually very muscular, and have one-track minds. Woe to those who get between them and their comfortable pen or their dinner of donuts. In order to meet their needs, to survive, they wouldn’t mind trampling you.

Or, in the case of Lola, bruising your ankles.

I stoop down and put my free hand on Lola’s nose.

“That’s enough, my girl.”

Surprisingly, she stops.

I sit on the straw and spread a handful of French fries in front of Lola. She snorts them up and then eagerly looks back up at me for more. Her actions are playful and energetic, almost dog-like. It isn’t long before the Styrofoam carryout box is empty.

Though Lola is finished with her snack, she isn’t finished with me. She turns around, carefully backing her stout little pig butt onto my lap. We sit together as I absently run my fingers along the black and white bristles on her back. Perhaps it isn’t pigs that I’m afraid of after all. Perhaps what makes me leery of them is their tendency to trample anything and everything to get what they want. Pigs can be dangerously selfish, but, as Lola is currently showing me, not all pigs are prone to bad behavior brought on by greed and desire.

And if I’m being honest in my musings, selfishness isn’t restricted to the actions of pigs.

I went to graduate school at a well-respected research university. Though my colleagues were not pigs, some of them had a tendency to show pig-like behavior in the presence of tenure-track positions, publishing deals, and eligible mates. I had to brace myself mentally and physically and politically from time to time, just so I wouldn’t get trampled in the name of someone else’s desires. And though I was strong and braced myself well, I was always very afraid.

No, it isn’t pigs that I fear. It’s the behavioral tendencies they’ve come to represent in my life. Thank goodness there is Lola though, whose sturdy little form feels like comfort and redemption and new beginnings as we sit in her stall filled with straw.

 

Note:  The farm where the above took place is called Sand Hill Stable. It’s a beautiful horse stable and farm located in the outskirts of the Ohio Western Reserve. If you ever need to board horses in the area, or just want to visit a beautiful jewel of Northeastern Ohio countryside, contact the marvelous stable manager.

July Birthdays

23 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by in Pushpins (Daily Life), Romantic Botany

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Short, pudgy, with dark hair falling down my back, I am nine and picking blackberries from the thicket in my family’s garden. It is July 11, my birthday, and I am in the backyard alone. The wind carries the voices of adults, murmuring about life’s cares, to me from the porch. I lift my head to the sound of their voices, pushing my bangs away from my eyes with purple-stained fingers.

“Sarah!” Mom calls, “Come back to the porch. The ice cream cake’s ready.”

And back I go, slowly, to a porch full of adults. I hold my hands up to the sun as I move, studying the purple blotches that cover my palms and fingers. In some places the blotches are a matte purple, settled and dried into the lines of my skin. In other places, the blotches are sticky, slick, and almost black. Being the imaginative child I am, I pretend that the blackberry juice is my own blood. I’ve been wounded in some epic struggle and am returning to hearth and home to reap the rewards of adult dotage and sugar-laden, dairy rich desserts.

My stained hands, and the imagination that they triggered, helped me to be grateful for a celebration that, though well intentioned, made me feel my isolation from other children my age more deeply. This combination of solitude and older company marked many of my childhood birthdays. I used to hate being born in July. All of my peers would usually be off on vacation, so I was stuck celebrating with my family.  It also meant that I would never improve my popularity in the classroom. School was out. That meant my mother never had to bake cupcakes for my classmates to honor my special day. Bringing cupcakes to class—especially if they had pink frosting—would have brought me into the folds of my peers. They would have made me appear normal, given me something in common with my classmates. But, my birthday happened at a weird time, further proving that I, a quiet, book-smart girl, was odd. Not someone to be friends with, but someone to tease.

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Still short, still pudgy (but far more curvy and muscly), with dark hair cropped close to the nape of my neck, I am twenty-nine and sitting in the back garden of my New Haven home. Blackberries won’t be in season for another month in New England. Now, they are whitish-pink, slowly growing into their violet blush. But, there is still a sort of purple stain on my hands—blueberries, pureed for bellinis, the small, spherical culprits. Around me sit and stand friends, of many ages and walks of life, their conversation and laughter anointed with the sweet tang of fruit and Prosecco.

My phone pings. A text from another friend. She sadly cannot make it, but can she take me out to lunch after she returns from vacation? I obviously reply yes.

Now I love having a birthday in July. As in my youth, many people are still on vacation when I celebrate. But, they make it a point to spend time with me after they return, making my birthday into a month of well-wishes, lunches, dinners, and drinks.

I step inside to wash off my purple-blue stained hands. I examine them as I move. In this moment, colored by company and love, the purple-blue splotches seem less like wounds and more like an outpouring of goodness.

Balance

21 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by in Pushpins (Daily Life)

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It still sucks that our Mom died when we were both still in our twenties. But, these phone conversations with my brother are becoming some of my life’s most sacred moments.

 

“Hey, Mattie. Thanks for calling me back.”

I sit on a garden bench, behind a mansion-turned-Yale-administrative building, concealed from the casual observer by clematis vines. As I lean further back into my verdant hiding place, my “e’s” and “a’s” ascend up my nose and echo in my nasal cavities. The carefully enunciated speech I use daily at Yale—the speech that others sometimes mistake as an English person’s when I’m either very nervous, or just trying to create polite, social distance at cocktail parties—begins to relax, nestling itself into a warm, Northeastern Ohio twang.

My words instinctively know that I have no need for nerves or polite social distance as I sit concealed by clematis vines. I’m speaking with my younger brother. And, concealing myself from the once little boy, who used to wipe boogers on me, is a very unwise thing to do. Especially, since that little boy is now a competent, gentle young man.

We talk about his forthcoming visit, maritime history, human psychology, and his friends. Subjects we have often touched upon in previous phone conversations. But, now that our Mom has been dead for exactly a year, our conversations also explore something else: family management. We talk about how our Dad and our 93 year-old Grandmother are actually doing, comparing conversations, trading observations, voicing concerns, and brainstorming solutions (if necessary). We also cry (me more than him) while uttering reflections about our Mom. Reflections only we two would understand, because we were her children.

The more we speak to each other in this way, the more I believe that we are creating a form of healthy communication we shall use with each other for the rest of our lives. We will only continue to make decisions about how to maintain and ensure our family’s well-being, property, and monetary assets as Dad and Grandma continue to age. I’m glad that we’re building this strong, open report now. I find that hard decisions become less difficult if you’re making them with someone you love, trust, and understand.

It still sucks that our Mom died when we were both still in our twenties. But, these phone conversations with my brother are becoming some my life’s most sacred moments. For through them, I see time shrink, merge, and fall away. Mattie is 24, and I, 28—a four-year age gap differentiating our life experiences. A huge chasm in our youth, especially during his booger-wiping phase, that is a chasm no longer. This young man on the other end of the phone and I seem to share more and more as we age. Though he has Mom’s coloring and I have Dad’s, we share our Mom’s cheekbones, eye sockets, and weirdly Romanesque nose. Though he is a mechanical engineer that specializes in historical machines and I am a librarian who specializes in Christian theology, we both deal with creating mechanized order and preserving history in our careers. Though he was socialized as a male and I a female, we have socialized each other to appreciate compassionate men and self-sufficient women. And between us, we have cultivated a penchant for Jane Austen, the Sandman comics, video games, British sitcoms, hiking, classical literature, sailing, and history.

But, most importantly, Mattie and I share the deep pain of losing our Mom, and, the responsibility of loving our family well in her absence.

I tell Mattie this, all of this, and he is quiet for a long time. “Well you know Sis, the universe always has a way of balancing itself out.”

It is my turn to be silent as I stare up into the sky, letting Mattie’s words properly seep into my thoughts. The sky is thick and dense with flat gray clouds. Yet, a rainbow gracefully arches across those clouds, its colors made even more vivid by the stark gray background.  A spray of water hits my cheeks, I only now realize it is raining, and I look up—higher—into the sky. This rainbow has a twin. A quiet echo of itself in color and shape.

“Yes Mattie, I must agree with you. The Universe does have a way of balancing itself out.”

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A Very Fan-Girly and Self-Centered Review of These! Paper! Bullets!

26 Wednesday Mar 2014

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Last Friday night, I got to once more experience my major high school obsessions—the Beatles and William Shakespeare—smashed together in one glorious rock musical. Because last Friday night, I went to see These! Paper! Bullets!, the Yale Repertory Theatre’s “modish ripoff” of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.

Sitting in the balcony of Yale University Theater, I felt like I was on the set of A Hard Day’s Night as the Quartros (Ben, Claude, Pedro, and Barth) played their opening song amidst a maelstrom of screaming female voices. Then the music stopped and the dialogue began, sweeping the audience into a wonderful blend of iambic pentameter and Liverpudlian slang. My body shivered in blissful delight as the players delivered the original Shakespearean dialogue with a Liverpudlian lilt, adorning their sentences with words like “gear” and “grotty.”

Hearing the mixing and matching of meters and slang, old and new, reminded me why I succumbed to the siren’s call of Shakespeare and the Beatles as a teen. It was because of their speech patterns. The Beatles and Shakespeare were the first to teach me, a Northeastern Ohio girl, that language could dance. Both Liverpudlian and Elizabethan speech cadences have a light, sing-songy musicality to them. It’s hard to speak in light, sing-songy ways with a Northeastern Ohio accent. Our “r’s” are hard and our “a’s,” nasal. When we speak, we mostly chew our words then spit them out. But thanks to Will and the Fab Four, I got exposed to two new patterns of speaking, very different from what I grew up using. Two different patterns of speaking that helped to expand my imagination as a writer.

If you’re in the New Haven area, I urge you to go see These! Paper! Bullets!. The show is charming, madcap, and so much fun. I dare you to count all of the cheeky Beatle song / Shakespearean references and puns…the show overflows with them!

For a less fan-girly review of the show, I’d like to direct you to an excellent one done by Eva Geertz for the New Haven Review: http://www.newhavenreview.com/index.php/2014/03/a-review-of-these-paper-bullets-by-a-very-reluctant-theater-goer/

And, if you’d like to get a sense of the show’s overall aesthetic, here is a video celebrating the show’s world premiere, courtesy of the Yale Repertory Theatre YouTube channel:

Warm Cats and Restless Laps

12 Wednesday Mar 2014

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When I was five, my family made the acquaintance of Peppermint, a seven-pound, black-haired, green-eyed cat. One early fall day, Peppermint jumped onto my father’s knee as he worked in our backyard. The tiny cat wouldn’t get off, and so, my father brought him into the house and Peppermint became our family pet.

Peppermint and I rarely lived in harmony when I was younger. Quiet and slow, he preferred the calm, languid sunbeams that warmed the front room’s bay window to my fidgety, kindergarten self. Despite our differences and my total lack of empathy for his disposition, I wanted him to be my friend—but, I always went about it the wrong way. Trying to pet him as he dozed in the sunbeams got me far more scratches than approving purrs.

Sometimes, and this was always a rare occasion, Peppermint would jump down from the bay window and up into my lap. As he curled into a tight ball, his small body would start to feel like seven tons rather than seven pounds. Seven tons of hot, furry mass pinning me down, keeping me from doing the important things kindergarteners do:  playing in the woods, artistically arranging dolls around my bedroom, dancing to cassette tapes of the Beatles. I resented Peppermint’s presence when he sat in my lap. I resented the time he made me wait for that presence. And most importantly, I resented his inability to be my loving pet when I wanted him to be.

Trying to pet him as he dozed in the sunbeams got me far more scratches than approving purrs.

Twenty-three years have passed since Peppermint first sat in my lap. Now, I’m no longer a squirming kindergartener (though I still spend time in the woods and dance to the Beatles). As I type this post to you, two happily purring cats sit on my outstretched, blanketed legs. They are my neighbors’ cats. I often look after them when my neighbors go out of town. In the beginning, both felines were suspicious of the strange person who chose to occupy their usual humans’ couch. Yet, with the blessing of time and cold weather, the cats finally decided that my lap was an okay place to be.

This time around, I didn’t mind the process. For I know something at twenty-eight that I didn’t know at five: As long as I am patient and understanding and without presumption, even the slowest of cat hearts will eventually open up and take comfort in my lap.

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Remembering Miss Rumphius

19 Wednesday Feb 2014

Posted by in Literature, Pushpins (Daily Life), The Creative Life

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Last week, I reconnected with Miss Rumphius, a lovely book from my childhood. A research project from work took me to YouTube, looking for short, inspirational videos. After a few key word searches, my eyes fell into the illustrations of this richly pigmented picture book. I again became part of Miss Rumphius’s story, left breathless by her colorful adventures and dazzled by the thick, spiky clumps of “blue and purple and rose colored lupines” she plants all over her town at the book’s end.

If you haven’t read it, or simply do not have the time to watch the video, let me tell you a little bit about the plot. The story follows the life of Alice Rumphius, a little girl who lives by the sea. When she is young, she wishes to go to far away places. And when she is old and tired of adventure, she wishes to live by the sea. In addition to these life ambitions, her grandfather challenges her to “do something to make the world more beautiful,” the hardest thing for a person to accomplish. So, Miss Rumphius grows up, moves away from home, becomes a librarian, goes on adventures, and when she is old, she lives by the sea, making the world more beautiful as she plants thousands of lupine seeds around her little town.

Listening to her story after all these years gave me an odd feeling–it felt like both remembering a long-forgotten memory and realizing a long, unspoken prophecy. In my youth, her life inspired me, a Midwesterner who had never seen the sea. She was an ideal I could only hope to aspire to: interesting, wise, and full of colorful stories. Now, I feel a strange affinity with Miss Rumphius, rather than a gape-mouthed awe. I feel like I have lived into bits of her essence. Like her, I have traveled to far off places and become a librarian. I also desire to create beauty for this world through writing, relationships, and cooking. Did this story help to shape me for the life I now live? Did this little piece of art help to mold my tastes and desires? In some ways, I think it did.

But in other ways, I think that this little piece of art was a striking story that helped to reinforce the values and life truths of the men and women who raised me. In quiet, unassuming ways, my family and my neighbors chose to create little artistic moments that startled and re-directed the lazy, predictable flow of small town Midwestern life. My grandmother planted larkspur every year in her garden for humming birds. At the beginning of each summer, we would try to guess where new patches of pink and purple-blue would appear, blown by last year’s winds. Where others saw piles of car parts and buckets of spark plugs, my grandfather saw (and would build) purring, rumbling Model T Fords and classic Roadsters. Our family garden, thanks to the efforts of my father, always had heirloom tomatoes in the summer–beautiful, ruby colored orbs whose taste was so rich, so deep, that each bite became a silken caress.

And there was my neighbor Helen, who would keep seed packets in her car, ready for her to open and scatter whenever she came across an abandoned parking lot or patch of dirt.

She was my own Miss Rumphius. Present in my life before I read this book.

Hard R’s and Nasal A’s

05 Wednesday Feb 2014

Posted by in Pushpins (Daily Life), Religious Exploration

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“Alright, sweetie, let’s get ya outta there.”

I bend down, and unbuckle Elliot from his stroller. He giggles in appreciation as I lift him out, then promptly repays my kindness by sprinting towards the park’s icy fountain. I run after him, and catch the toddler in my arms before his little gloved hands touch jagged ice.

“No ma dear. Ya musn’t touch that. It needs left alone.”

My consonants begin to slur, my hard r’s growl from the back of my throat, and my a’s embed themselves high in my nasal cavities. And for a moment, I am no longer in a New England park. I am back in Northeastern Ohio. I am a little girl, trying to touch a glass jar on a supermarket shelf, barely stopped by my mother’s arms.

“No ma dear.” My mother said. “Ya musn’t touch that. It needs left alone.”

My consonants begin to slur, my hard r’s growl from the back of my throat, and my a’s embed themselves high in my nasal cavities.

Five years away from Northeastern Ohio has helped to smooth out my hard, folksy, Midwestern accent. Studying in both in England and at an Ivy League institution has further gentrified it. I say “back” instead of “beACK” on a regular basis now. But, those Midwestern speech patterns and accents do come back. I hear them when I am giving practical advice, I hear them when I speak with friends I love and trust, I hear them when I talk to children. My Midwestern accent comes out when I am relaxed, when I am willing to be completely vulnerable. Hard r’s and nasal a’s are my auditory reminders of home, of parental nurture, of unconditional love.

I am not the first to think this way. Centuries ago, Dante wrote his beautiful sacred poetry in Italian instead of Latin. Though Latin was the scholarly language of the church, Italian was the language of Dante’s mother and father–the language that reminded him of deep, unspoken intimacy and love. A much more intuitive medium for him to explore God’s love for humanity through.

My Midwestern accent comes out when I am relaxed, when I am willing to be completely vulnerable.

Elliot wiggles in my arms, now. He points at his stroller.

“Oh, do you want to go beACK?”

“Yeah!”

“Okay, then. Give me your hand.”

He reaches out his small hand, I take it into my larger one, and we walk back to the stroller. Thank God love manifests in many different ways; thank God love wraps itself up in daily word and tone.

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