Love in the Time of Strawberries

In memory of Freda Schroeder, October 23, 1935–November 20, 2020 

rest in peace beloved aunt

 July 11, 2020: Crouching next to the strawberry row, knees creaking and wrists aching, I push aside plants, looking for bright red clusters of berries to fill my basket. I suddenly remember my mother making a strawberry-banana salad with mayonnaise-honey dressing for her parents and saying how much her father loved that salad. I pause in my picking. Hot tears sting my eyes.

 

STRAWBERRIES I

 

When I was young, the only u-pick strawberry farms anywhere near us were in Hadashville, a 45-minute drive east of Blumenort. Here the soil was sandy and the strawberries thrived. We left early—5:30, I think—because we didn’t want to risk being turned away from a strawberry field where all the rows had already been assigned. I hated—hated!—getting up so early, but I was always eager to go. I wonder now for how long I remained grumpy as we drove. In the tiny hamlet of Hadashville, we crossed the railway track north of the Trans Canada Highway, turned right, and in half a mile we were at the strawberry farm. We picked strawberries until all of the 1-gallon plastic ice cream pails we had brought with us were full, all of which we set in the trunk of our 1969 green Biscayne Chevrolet. I can’t remember whether we kept one pail in the car to eat on the drive home. I suspect not. But we did eat strawberries later in the day as we were hulling them. Then Chanlena Farms opened up in Greenland, only a few miles from Blumenort, and we began picking there. 

 

Left to right: Kerry Fast, Rosabel Fast, Linda Janzen (my great-aunt), Emily Fast 
Hadashville, MB, c. 1980

I have always loved picking strawberries. Even the early rising as a teenager and now the painful knees, back and wrists of middle age have never dulled my anticipation and joy in picking.

 

STRAWBERRIES II

 

My mother talked more about her father to me than about her mother, and when I pressed her for stories about my grandmother, she so often said that she had been sickly and how finally, once she had had her gall bladder removed, she was like a new mother. “But Freda and Mary would know more,” she would add. Maybe she recommended these two youngest sisters because they had known their mother intimately at a time when my mother was far removed from her parents. In 1952 my grandparents and their youngest five children moved to Mexico, as did my parents and three married siblings of my mother, where they lived on Quellen Kolonie, a Kleine Gemeinde Mennonite colony in northern Mexico. My parents lived there for only three years before returning to Manitoba, while my grandparents remained for another eight. For those eight years, my mother interacted with her parents only through letters and the occasional visit. That separation ended on May 4, 1963, at 9:00 a.m., when she and her brother Henry and sister-in-law Margaret welcomed their parents back to Canada at Union Station in Winnipeg. 

 

After my mother died, and I could no longer prod her memory, I finally heeded her advice, and a few years ago I prepared faspa for my two aunts. I wanted to hear about my grandmother, their mother, of whom I knew so little. Our conversation focused largely on the years in which my grandparents and their younger children lived on Quellen Kolonie. My mother’s instinct had been correct—as teenagers, my two aunts immersed themselves in farm life on the colony. And I heard about strawberries. Mexican strawberries were, by their account, very good. Both aunts had no doubt that their mother had made the best-ever strawberry pie, and my aunt Freda enthusiastically mimicked her mother deftly and swiftly rolling out the pastry. This was indeed a different grandmother than my mother had described. She never talked about her mother making strawberry pie or any other pie for that matter, and she never made strawberry pie herself. But she did can pantry shelves-full of strawberry preserves, like her mother did. 

Left to right: Tina Fast, Freda Schroeder, Mary Friesen

Strawberries are mentioned several times in my grandparents’ diary in the years they lived in Mexico. No wonder my aunts remembered them with such enthusiasm. In 1956, my grandparents purchased strawberries at least three times. On one of these occasions, my grandmother noted that she had canned eight quarts from the basket of strawberries they had bought. In March 1958, my grandmother recorded hulling strawberries, and on April 15, 1959, she canned five baskets of strawberries. That’s 40 quarts of preserves if the baskets were the same size as they had been in 1956. The following year, in February, she again canned strawberries as she did on March 1, 1962. The next day she baked pie. I can only assume that that was strawberry pie! On May 24 of the same year, my grandparents again bought strawberries, and on the following day, my grandmother canned them all, she wrote. My grandparents and their many visitors will have enjoyed many a faspa with tweebuck (buns) and strawberry perserves.

 

But it was after their return to Blumenort in 1963 that their own strawberry production picked up. On May 26, 1964, a year after they moved back to Manitoba, my grandfather planted strawberries. He didn't record how many plants he put in. But on May 10, the following year, he planted another 200 strawberry plants, for which he paid three cents a plant. On July 10, my grandmother and Taunte Mary picked strawberries. On the 15th, my grandparents supplemented their own strawberry harvest with 18 pounds of berries my Taunte Greeta brought over. These cost them 30 cents a pound. The next day my grandfather hulled these strawberries before he took his saw blade to Steinbach to be sharpened. The following day my aunts Mary and Freda helped my grandmother can them. On October 15, my grandmother covered the berry plants with straw for the winter, which required considerable physical effort on her part, she noted.

 

On June 4, 1966, my grandfather recorded that the strawberries in their garden were beginning to bloom. A month later, on July 4, my aunt Mary picked 20 pounds of strawberries from these plants. The next day, my grandmother recorded that she made pie with their first strawberries of the season. The next day, July 5, Taunte Mary again picked strawberries. On the 11th, my mother and Taunte Freda picked strawberries for their parents, and on the 13th, once again Taunte Mary picked strawberries, but this picking yielded only 9 pounds. On the 16th, my grandfather recorded that Tina, my mother, picked the last of the strawberries—4 pounds. On the 18th, my grandmother described her day: “I worked on my quilt and baked bread and zweibach. Baked pie of the last strawberries.” The diary doesn’t record who covered the strawberries that year as winter loomed, but the 1966 strawberry season for Abram R. and Elisabeth U. Plett had been abundant.

 

This large strawberry production continued for a while. And let me remind you that there were raspberries too, which my aunts, siblings and cousins picked! My mother was known to shake her head at what she saw as her father’s “overboard” enthusiasm for raspberry production. (I suspect she felt the same way about his strawberries). But as the years progressed, my grandparents’ diary records a gradual shift away from strawberry production to their daughters and daughters-in-law (and their children, no doubt) picking strawberries for their parents at u-pick farms rather than on the back forty of my grandparents’ yard.

 

STRAWBERRIES III

 

Left: Abram R. Plett reading from Die Gute Nachricht (German New Testament)

Right: Elizabeth U. Plett distributing Christmas gifts to each member of the Plett family

Christmas 1974, Blumenort Church basement

Near the end of his life, my grandfather, Groospape as I called him, was hospitalized several times because of a large, diabetes-related sore on his leg that wouldn’t heal. Groosmame was home alone for three long stretches of time in the fall and winter of 1978—dark days indeed. Five of their daughters and three of their sons lived nearby, two sons lived in the Interlake, about a 2-hour drive away, and a daughter in Mexico. My grandparents’ diary tells me that these children were devoted in their care for their parents in those long months. Taunte Neeta often brought tweebuck she had baked. On December 29, 1978, Uncle Henry brought four loaves of bulkje (white bread) made by my Taunte Greeta. My mother often did their laundry. My aunt Mary lived next door and kept a close eye on her parents. Her children are often mentioned in my grandparents’ diary as helping out in the house and in my grandfather’s shop or having faspa with their grandparents (oh, how I envy those cousins). My uncles and aunts took turns giving Groosmame almost daily rides to the hospital to see her geliebte (beloved) husband, and when my grandfather was home, their children continued to check up on and visit their parents daily. On one occasion when my mother came home after dropping off her mother following a visit to the hospital—perhaps on January 16, 1979, when Groosmame noted that “Tina took me to see my husband. She also came in for a little while”—she remarked how Groosmame had kissed Groospape as she left his hospital room. This was not something my mother had seen very often in her life, if ever. In diary entries that my grandfather and grandmother wrote, so often in that last year, after noting which child came to visit or bring food, concluded their entries with “thank-you,” as if to ensure their gratitude would endure beyond their allotted time on earth and its depth be felt by their children and grandchildren in years to come when they read their diary. These unfamiliar gestures of tenderness and affection extended by Groosmame and Groospape and the vigilant care offered by their children in this time of darkness were nothing other than an expression of the love they had fostered for each other in the many years they had been a family. 

 

I remember that my mother would go to her parents to dress her father’s sore when he was not in the hospital. I remember her worrying that the sore was not healing. I think my mother must have known that he was nearing the end of his life, or at least feared that he was. I, as a teenager, was oblivious to the loss my mother was dreading. One Sunday morning in late January 1979, when he was home on a Sunday pass, Groospape died. He was 81 years old. I was 14. My mother was nearly the age I am now.

 

On that Sunday in late January, when all my uncles and aunts except Taunte Esther, who lived in Mexico, had gathered at their parents’ house to offer their fragmented grief in support of each other and their mother, Groosmame lay down in the afternoon to rest but did not wake up. She had had a stroke and died the following evening. My mother said time and time again how grateful she was that her mother would now not have to live apart from her husband, but she was mostly silent about her own staggering loss.

 

I can’t remember which year my mother made the strawberry-banana salad with mayonnaise-honey dressing for her parents, but it was in the final few years of their lives—perhaps it was the July 1978 strawberry season.

 

 

________________________________________________________________________________________

Elizabeth Unger Plett, May 6, 1901–January 29, 1979

Abram Reimer Plett, November 25, 1897–January 28, 1979

 

Aganetha (Nettie) U. Fast, December 3, 1917–January 5, 2003

Elizabeth (Lisa) U. Friesen, February 10, 1919–April 27, 1988

Henry K. Plett, November 17, 1921–August 23, 2006

Katherine (Tina) K. Fast, November 14, 1923–May 1, 2014

Jacob K. Plett, July 3, 1925–October 13, 2013

Cornelius K. Plett, September 17, 1927–November 4, 1927          

Thomas K. Plett, June 4, 1929–October 21, 2017

Esther K. Petkau, April 3, 1931–December 18, 2019

Klaas (Nick) K. Plett, February 12, 1933–January 31, 2020

Freda K. Schroeder, October 23, 1935–November 20, 2020

Mary K. Friesen, January 1, 1939–

Abram K. Plett, May 22, 1941–May 2, 2020

_______________________________________________________________________________________

 

Thank you to my sister Julene for her memories of my grandmother’s kiss and my mother’s exasperation. Thank you to Viola and Emily for discussing strawberry picking and our grandmother with me. 

 

Thank you Taunte Mary and Taunte Freda for sharing your memories with me! Your story about your mother's strawberry pie sparked the idea for this blog post.

 

I have drawn much of the material for this post from Family Diaries: Elizabeth U. Kornelsen and Abram R. Plett, Volume 1, 1917 and 1937–1959 and Volume 2, 1960–1979. An extremely big thank you to Taunte Marie for translating the diary of her parents-in-law from German into English. Thank you also to her daughter-in-law Erna Plett for typing up her translation and her daughter Lynette Plett for formatting and printing the diary. This is truly a priceless gift you have given our family.

 

My mother used overboard when she was sputting (mocking) and pronounced it with Plautdietsch vowels to more or less rhyme with the English gourd.

Breakfast on Sabinal IV: papaya and hot chocolate

I never actually had papaya and hot chocolate for breakfast on Sabinal. I had it at Restaurant Constantino at the corner of Calle Minerva and Avenida Benito Juarez in the grid of dusty grey streets that makes up the Chihuahuan desert city of Nuevo Casas Grandes. Constantino is not a restaurant I'd highly recommend; a little bit dumpy, tables and chairs sprawled messily throughout the room. Nor would I vouch for the food except for the lime-soured papaya and the frothy hot chocolate.

Sabinal is a small isolated Mennonite colony in northern Mexico connected to Nuevo Casas Grandes by an abandoned railroad bed-turned-shale covered road which lurches and bumps through endless miles of scrub bushes; creosote and mesquite, prickly pear and yucca lost in the barren beautiful desert of sky and mountains. Sabinal Mennonites resist modernization and its easing amenities including electricity and vehicles as they persist in the harshness of desert farming. Facing astronomical odds, a few prosper, most tenaciously hang on, and others abandon another failed cotton, onion or chili crop for a house trailer and a steady, albeit cash-under-the-table job in Texas.

I spent the cold, shivering month of February 2009 on Sabinal conducting ethnographic research and while there was generously hosted by the Klassen, Hiebert, Braun, Harder and Wall families. I joined them around their tables, I awkwardly climbed in and out of their buggies, I sat stiffly upright on a wooden church bench listening to the singing of a hundred Old Colony Mennonites worrying that my skirt was too short. I laughed with three-year-old Henry as I pushed him around and around his grandmother’s yard on a scooter. I accompanied Anna Braun to the pasture to bring the dairy herd home in the evening as she explained the eccentricity of a cow who insisted on sucking her own teets. I listened as Maria Harder sang Elvis Presley and Wilf Carter, songs she remembered from her youth in British Columbia. I heard stories of neighborly tensions, dogs poisoned, cows trampling gardens. I was invigorated and exhausted and marveled at my own tenuous and inadequate understanding of it all.

Near the end of my stay on Sabinal, I joined Susanna, Sarah and Margaret Klassen on a late night ride across the colony to village #7 to deliver a band saw blade that needed sharpening for the upcoming Klassen pig butchering. In spite of the glistening infinity of a galaxy of stars overhead and the orange haze of Ciudad Juárez’ million lights glowing in the distant northeastern sky, the night was blindingly black. The busyness of daily life had quieted on Sabinal, houses were darkened and most families were asleep. Reins in hand, Sarah deftly guided the horse through the darkness as she quizzed me about a train that could take me clear across a city all the while underground. I, on the other hand, was distracted, overwhelmed by the beauty of the black stillness, relieved to be miles away from the noise and lights of Toronto. In the lulling and languishing of our conversation, I knew this sky to be big enough to hold the intimacies of connection and the mutual misunderstandings of our different worlds, an expanse vast enough to embrace the happiness and courage, the discontentment, the sorrows, the exclusions, the grasping, the satisfactions and the worry, the predictability and the bewildering that I had witnessed as life on Sabinal.



Constitucion Oriente

During my month on Sabinal I periodically returned to Nuevo Casas Grandes to catch my breath. On those mornings when I disembarked from the bus that had brought me from Sabinal to Nuevo Casas Grandes, I stepped into a dreadedwelcomed solitude so different from the bustle of colony life. I was relieved to be away from the curious gaze of colony Mennonites and even more relieved to shed the obligation of my own ethnographic curiosity. I anticipated sorting through my Sabinal-intense thoughts but I shrank from the trepidating loneliness of having no one to share those thoughts with. Arriving early enough for a second breakfast I usually headed up Constitución Poniente, away from the cluster of Sabinal Mennonites who had traveled with me, walked as far as Minerva and then inevitably turned in to Restaurant Constantino.

A breakfast of papaya and hot chocolate does not register as one of Mexico’s culinary wonders. The dry brown winterness of Nuevo Casas Grandes is a long, long way from Mexico’s culinary capital, Oaxaca, where chefs of Pilar Cabrera fame pestle a thousand richnesses—mulatos, pasillas, anchos, walnuts, sesame seeds, pine nuts, pepitas, all spice, cinnamon, plantain, raisins, pears, prunes, tomatillos, garlic, chocolate, panela—into the thick sticky moles that make that state famous. Nothing Nuevo Casas Grandes has on offer even begins to approach the seven-hued splendors of Oaxaca’s moles. I enjoyed the bacon-wrapped, cheese-stuffed jalapeños at a seafood joint downtown, the creamed chili burritos from a stand crowded into the corner of a supermarket and tortilla soup in the restaurant of Villa Colonial hotel but Nuevo Casas Grandes is no culinary mecca. Its fare is what you would expect in a dusty northern town, simple flavors that make only modest demands on the palate. Yet there is a time and place for everything, even the unpretentious, ordinary, sometimes mediocre food of Nuevo Casas Grandes. On those cold February mornings when I stepped off the bus I had a sky full of complexities to contemplate so what in heaven’s name would I have done with a dish of mole negro oaxaqueño or mancha manteles de cerdo? No, I needed a palated quietude for breakfast. I was content with papaya and hot chocolate, a plate of effortless simplicity set down in front of me, a mug of warming smoothness to grasp in my hands.


mancha manteles de cerdo - pork table cloth stainer

Breakfast on Sabinal III: milking sunrise

Breakfast on Sabinal II: watch what you say

I should not have said “oatmeal.” I should have been evasive, I should have hemmed and hawed, "oh, different things, sometimes this, sometimes that." But I didn't. I said I usually ate oatmeal for breakfast. I've never liked oatmeal that much but I started eating it regularly about two years ago; healthier than boxed cereal and more substantial than toast. I've learned to cook it in such a way that I can enjoy it. I use small granular Scottish oats—rather than rolled—mixed with Red River Cereal to lessen the sliminess, cooked in milk rather than water for a more full-bodied flavor. This is the only way I can enjoy oatmeal. So I should have known better than to say “oatmeal.” Inevitably, the next morning while everyone else ate cookies and bread, I was served oatmeal, large undercooked flakes of rolled oats in a thin watery goo. But I filled my bowl, added some milk, a spoon of sugar and ate the porridge. I expressed my thanks to my host and sighed with relief as I got up from the table.

The next morning I crawled out of bed before the sun rose as I had to catch the bus back to Nuevo Casas Grandes. Apart from my host who was going to take me to the bus, the entire household was still asleep. After I had completed my morning ablutions and packed my bag, I sat down at the table laid out for me. By now the sky was beginning to glow with the morning light, but the room where I sat was still dark. I could just make out the pot I had seen yesterday so I knew I was being served oatmeal again. I lifted a spoonful to my mouth and did so with a certain lightness. I could manage another bowl of oatmeal on this my last morning on Sabinal. I slid the porridge into my mouth; cold, solid, leftover from yesterday! All I could do was wash each spoonful down with a gulp of coffee and hope that the darkness covered my dismayed grimace. I emptied the bowl, expressed my thanks and climbed into the buggy with relief.

breakfast on Sabinal I: can there be breakfast on Sabinal without coffee?

On those frigid February mornings as a cold stillness dawns, what else is one to do but greedily slurp up gulping mouthfuls of coffee filling every inch of the body?

Many mornings I stood in the cold of a desert winter watching the Klassens, the Hieberts, the Harders milk their cows, feed their calves, release their squawking chickens for the day. It wasn't until the cows had been let out to pasture, the milk cans wheeled to the street to be picked up by the milk wagon later that morning and everyone washed and cleaned of barn smells that breakfast was served. A prayer was silently shared and then breakfast began, cookies, big flat cookies with marshmallow and chocolate topping, soft white buns--Tweeback, a pat of butter, no make that two pats and, of course, coffee. Cups were filled with boiling water, instant coffee spooned in followed by some creamer and then cold water added to cool it off. When everyone was satiated another silent prayer was shared and the busyness of the day could begin.

Most Mennonites on Sabinal are dairy farmers and have been for generations, ever since their fore-parents left Saskatchewan for Durango with their dairy herds in tow nearly a century ago. Every family I visited had a herd of cows. A fortunate few could afford milking machines but most families milked their cows by hand twice daily. Herds were regularly rotated on the fragile pastures that have been claimed from the Chihuahuan desert and which had to be carefully irrigated to be sustained. This intensity of never-ending dairy labor supplies the colony's two cheese factories with all the milk needed to produce the sought-after Mexican specialty, queso menonita. Sabinal cheese is particularly coveted because Sabinal is the only Mennonite colony in the Nuevo Casas Grandes area that does not use additives in its cheese.

Queso menonita is not the only dairy delight that Sabinal Mennonites know how produce and which they savor. Slices of soft unripened cheese pressed in the early hours of the morning, Brocke—pieces of Tweeback dunked in coat-your-lips-creamy curds, feather-light cottage cheese mounded onto Tweeback; lavish clottings of whipped cream atop cream pie. These are just the beginnings of the possibilities that can enhance a breakfast if you own a dairy herd. Without a doubt, Sabinal Mennonites have dairy in their bones. And so every morning as I spooned instant creamer into my instant coffee I marveled that a colony full of people who revel in consuming dairy in its many extravagances and for whom caressing a swollen udder is next to godliness, if not godliness itself, has collectively forgotten the pleasure of pouring thick sweet cream into its coffee and has resorted to syrupy-sweet, oily powder as a substitute. Surely with more than a thousand Holsteins within the fifty square kilometers that make up Sabinal there must at least one family that still drinks its coffee with cream, but I never had the good fortune to share a breakfast with that elusive family.

And then one morning it all made sense. Eating breakfast with the Klassen family, I watched first Jacob, and then his sister Susanna take a cookie from the bowl, one of those big marshmallow chocolate orbs, reach over to pull the butter dish closer and then slice a thick, creamy slab of golden goodness from the pat. I watched as they cut into the butter once again and then as they slid the butter-cum-cheese from their knives onto their cookies. In an instant I understood. This is no insipid, super-market-bland anemic paste that passes as butter where I come from. This is butter in all its dairy splendor, potent with the sharpness of soured cream, a sumptuous mouthful that lingers on the taste of pasture. This is the raison d'etre that sustains the ongoing grind of milking, day upon day, morning and evening, in the frosty winter or the blistering forty degree heat of a desert summer. This is an entire week's carefully hoarded accumulation of cream and I would dare to ask for some cream for my coffee?