Apple to Apple

During my junior high years I biked to the branch library on Bristol Road once a week. Dodging potholes in the road, I balanced the bike basket full of books and a sack of books hanging from each handle bar. Finally, back in my room and sprawled across my bed, I’d open To Kill a Mockingbird and find Atticus Finch saying, “You just hold your head high and keep those fists down. No matter what anybody says to you, don’t you let ‘em get your goat. Try fighting with your head for a change.”

Or I’d burrow into The Diary of a Young Girl and think about what Anne Frank said: “It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because despite everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

I laughed through Cheaper by the Dozen because Mr. Gilbreth and my dad were the same person. The only real difference was that my dad went to church.

When I read the formulaic books—Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Trixie Belden, and Cherry Ames, I found comfort in their organization, their predictability, and their happy endings.

Mennonite books from the church library, books like Mattie Mae and The Miller Five and Betsy Buttonwood and The Crying Heart helped me remember that other plain people like me were alive somewhere. They helped me go back to Yoder School for an hour.

All these books took me away, which is where I wanted to be. I read during class with my book hidden on my lap. I read during study hall and lunch. I read at home while I dried dishes with the book propped up on the window sill above the kitchen sink. I read while I rocked my little brother to sleep. I read as I walked home from school. When I’m a teacher, I thought, I just might let my class read for a whole day.

“There’s a dark side to your book,” my mom told me yesterday. “It’s messing up your dad’s naps. He can’t stop reading to sleep.”

It’s no wonder. He’s all through the story.

I took my parents a copy of Yoder School the other day. Inside the front cover I wrote them a note:

To Mom and Dad,
You formed so much of this story.
With my love,
Phyllis

Here you can see a photo of my parents and me in the beautiful mountains of Western Maryland before we moved away to the city.

And here we are on the day I gave them my memoir, all of us looking as if the decades have aged us.

 

 

 

When I was writing a curriculum about peace, Titus Peachey reached out to me. For decades, Titus had been the director of peace education for Mennonite Central Committee, a relief, service, and peace agency that works in more than 50 countries. He shared resources with me, and we talked about how people learn.

Titus, too, comes from Western Maryland. He also grew up with the taste of maple syrup and sounds of Pennsylvania Dutch and the panorama of autumn color on the mountain sides. And like me, Titus left those childhood scenes to pursue his callings.

This is why I was grateful when Titus agreed to read Yoder School. And I appreciate his comments.

“Phyllis Swartz reached out and drew me in with her warm and thoughtful memoir. Her journey out of the comfortable cocoon of her childhood to encounter the wider world stirred my own reflections on identity, belonging, and faith.”

—Titus Peachey, Peace Advocate

 

I’m the baby in this picture, the first in my generation to be born into this family. My dad is holding me and standing next to my mother. You can see my grandparents, my many aunts, and my Uncle Philip, who was just a few years older than I was.  And this is only one part of the family we left when we moved from Grantsville, Maryland, to Flint Michigan. The Benders—my mother’s family—was even larger, more than 70 people . . . and growing.

When this picture was taken, none of us knew my parents and I and my coming brothers and sisters would move away from the mountains, away from a Mennonite community, and away the country to live in the city of Flint, Michigan.

 

I’m the baby in this picture, the first in my generation to be born into this family. My dad is holding me and standing next to my mother. You can see my grandparents, my many aunts, and my Uncle Philip, who was just a few years older than I was.  And this is only one part of the family we left when we moved from Grantsville, Maryland, to Flint Michigan. The Benders—my mother’s family—was even larger, more than 70 people . . . and growing.

When this picture was taken, none of us knew my parents and I and my coming brothers and sisters would move away from the mountains, away from a Mennonite community, and away the country to live in the city of Flint, Michigan.

 

I did third grade twice: once in Alvina’s room at Yoder School and once in Mrs. Lott’s room in Flint, Michigan. Mrs. Lott taught at South Bendle Elementary, eight blocks from our new home in the parsonage of the Mennonite mission church. Mr. Watson, the principal, looked at my age and said I was in third grade. No matter that I already knew how to divide and had already read Charlotte’s Web. So I dutifully re-solved last year’s math problems and answered endless comprehension questions from third grade readers.

Alvina liked school, but Mrs. Lott didn’t. And I could see why. Her room was full of too many noisy kids. These kids, I decided, must not have had parents who taught them to listen to a teacher. In Mrs. Lott’s crowded room, there weren’t enough desks to go around, and we had to share books. Besides all this, there were no meadows or woods around the school, no place for her to send students to gather flowers or to read under a tree.

No wonder she looked too tired to get excited about a lesson. She sat there behind her desk with her curls tight, not bouncy and free, her mouth in a thin straight line, and worry wrinkles across her forehead. I felt sorry for her. But I also felt restless—rutschy, as we said in Pennsylvania Dutch. Still I tried to be good, to not make even more trouble for Mrs. Lott.

In Mrs. Lott’s room the flies around the window sills droned on and on. I stared out the window and watched a colorless elm leaf drift from a tree. The breeze lazily picked up a corner of the American flag, then changed its mind and dropped it. I watched the second hand tick past the minute hand, and I squinted my eyes to catch the hour hand move. Is this what school would be like away from Alvina? And somewhere inside me, an ache began to grow.

I figured it out on my paper. Counting this year, I’d have to sit in school for fourteen years to get my college diploma—almost twice as long as my entire life so far. I had thought the hard part was over when I said good-bye to Yoder School, but now I knew the hardest part lay ahead.

The back of my throat hurt, like it was bleeding. I buried my face between my arms on my desk. I can’t do this, I thought. But I had to. I wiped my sniffles on the sleeve of my dress and picked up my book. I had to find the gumption to carry on—to learn to be a good teacher without Alvina.

John Roth gathers stories. He wrote, for example,  Stories: How Mennonites Came to Be. In this book, he tells a big story by showing how history and theology weave through the lives of individuals. And, in a project called Bearing Witness, John collects stories of how people living today suffer for faith.

I was with John in Nicaragua once when he was talking to people about their stories. I noticed how well he listened and asked questions and then more questions to be sure he understood. People sensed, I could tell, that John knew their stories mattered and that he would tell their stories well.

So when John agreed to read my story and comment on it, I was delighted.

 “In vivid prose, Swartz offers readers an intimate window into the life of a passionate learner. Her hunger for a deeper understanding of the world around her—be it the culture of her Amish Mennonite upbringing, the lives of her students, or the complexities of modern science and politics—is truly inspiring. I highly recommend this memoir.”

—John D. Roth, Professor of History, Goshen College; Director; Mennonite Historical Library; and Editor, Mennonite Quarterly Review

The publication date for Yoder School is here! I’ve been waiting for this day. More than 50 years ago, on my tenth birthday, my parents gave me Elizabeth Yates’s book Someday You’ll Write. I read that book and set a goal to publish a book before I died.

Through the decades I thought of this goal . . . often. But I never wrote a book. Instead, I taught school, served on the library board, and ran a music camp. I volunteered at church and had children and then grandchildren. But I kept thinking about the book I never wrote.

Then I retired from teaching. And I had a decision to make. Would I try to write a book?

I started reading books about writing and attending writing conferences. I began to write every day, and gradually, chapter after chapter, my story emerged.

Five times I thought my manuscript was as polished as I could polish. And each of these times, my critiquers showed me that it was flawed, sometimes deeply. I kept revising. Then I sent my manuscript to a press I thought would accept it. But the book was rejected. Often I wondered if this book would be published.

But I was dogged. And I was helped by many people, especially my author son. And so this publication date has now come.

Just a couple days ago, a package from Cascadia Publishing House arrived on my porch. My complimentary books, I guessed, were inside. For a moment I felt unsure, a little breathless. But when I opened the package, it was true. My book had been published.

If you’d like to buy a copy, you can find one at the following sites:

• Cascadia Publishing House
• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble

Those last months in western Maryland were a season of farewell. I found myself clinging to Gertrude, who promised to write to me. I asked my grandpa for stories of long ago. I walked in the woods to say goodbye, following my nose to the skunk cabbage by the pond and digging under leaves to find jacks-in-the-pulpit. I lifted the green hooded flowers with brown stripes to find Jack, always standing tall in the pulpit, even though nobody was listening. And in the night garden, I looked to make sure the Big Dipper still spilled stars and watched the night lights glint in the creek. In all these visits, I took pictures with my eyes so I could remember.

Finally, one day I found a comfort. I would buy some land, I decided, before we moved. Land that would wait for me while I was gone. Walking up the lane after school one afternoon, I found the plot I wanted. The lane, the creek, and a row of trees formed a triangle around a parcel maybe twice as big as my bedroom.

Later when I graduate from college, I thought, and come back to teach at Yoder School, I’ll build a small house here. I sat under the maple tree and looked around. Along the creek, shepherd’s purse plants waved in the breeze. Bees flitted in the daisies.

The land belonged to Luella and Meely, two ancient sisters with silver hair who wore ruffled aprons over their plain dresses and bustled around every Wednesday baking cinnamon rolls. They sold these cinnamon rolls for spending money. If I buy this plot of land, I thought, they’ll have even more spending money.

In my bedroom I climbed on my desk to get my piggy bank from the high shelf. The pink pig with a big belly, a red hat, and blue coveralls sat on its hind legs staring out of big black eyes. I was glad I had plunked my birthday money into the pig instead of spending it. I’d be willing to give up my entire savings for the land, I decided. My ancestors had lived in these mountains for over a hundred years, and I belonged here, too.

I held the pig in one hand and knocked on Luella’s and Meely’s door with the other. This was Wednesday, and I could smell the cinnamon.

“Come in!” Meely said.

And then I didn’t know how to start. So I stammered around explaining that I needed to own some land and I wanted it to be near my house and the triangle between the creek and the lane and the trees would work fine and I was prepared to give them all the money in my bank for that land.

Meely looked at Luella. Luella set the spatula beside the cinnamon rolls she had been frosting. She squatted down beside me and explained that, no, they didn’t want to sell their land, not even this little part of it, not even for all the money in my piggy bank—not even if I saved for another year.

I swallowed and blinked so I wouldn’t cry and said that, no, I didn’t want a cinnamon roll. And I fled.