It's not too often that a reporter gets an invitation to a birthday lunch with a reader's family just for the sheer why not of it. So, when the phone at my desk rang Friday morning and a Mr. Elvin Weaver asked if I would be free at noon to come out to see his daughter, Rachel, I wasn't sure what to think. The paper generally doesn't cover any birthday parties except the 100-year-old kind. I was trying to find a kind way to phrase that when he added that it wasn't a request to be in the newspaper. Rather, the "scholars" of the family would be home at noon when their one-room school house let out for the day, and if I was free then, he thought it would be nice for one Rachel to be at the birthday of another Rachel.
It hit me all at once Elvin Weaver was Mennonite, Old-Order Groffdale to be specific. (In laymen's terms, that's horse-and-buggy Mennonite to those of you who may never have read my four-part series on the influx of Mennonite families to the Finger Lakes.) It's been almost four years since I wrote that, and though there have been a few, rare articles that have served as touchpoints to their community since, I never met anyone from this particular family. I hung up thinking it was one of my most unusual calls and nearly dismissed it. But when I heard "Aww, that's sweet. You should go. How often does that happen?" from a handful of co-workers, I reconsidered.
A few hours later, I found myself, flower plant in hand, inside a neat, simple farmhouse outside Rushville. They'd held lunch for me while my car fought the snowdrifts that had blown back into the roads along the way. This was not just soup-and-sandwiches, but a full-fledged, farm-hardy spread: mashed potatoes, corn, beef-and-pork meatballs from the pig slaughtered last week, sweet gravy, macaroni-and-cheese, and homemade sweet pickles. The older boys -- Irvin, John David, and Timothy -- put quite a bit of it away. There was cake too, of course, a simple, single-layer strawberry cake in a rectangular pan that the older girls, Rosene and Norma, helped their mother decorate with icing, flavored mint chips and a few plastic flowers.
And I'm sure several children were involved in the makings of the bucket of hand-churned, homemade vanilla ice cream. It was rather humbling for a perfect stranger to be welcomed in and given a seat at the head of the table. Back in the days I knew attempting to gain the confidence and hopefully, respect of such conservative folk might be helped by more conservative apparel, I wore long dresses and skipped the jewelry. No such luck Friday, and goodness knows, the bright pink sweater, silver necklace, and blue jeans almost certainly had something to do with the whispers and glances coming my way from the kids. However, some cultural traditions are shared no matter what community you come from, and birthday cake rituals are certainly one of those.
Chubby-cheeked little Rachel Weaver stood on her daddy's lap and contemplated the burning candle atop her cake while brother Nelson, two seats away in his booster seat wasted no time in showing her how to blow it out. She promptly stuck her fingers in the frosting, like every one-year-old any of us has ever sung "Happy Birthday" to. The lone present, from her grandparents, was a set of plastic training pants and a hardy book with a kitten on its thick cover. As expected, she seemed more intrigued by the shiny, crinkly paper it was wrapped in.
Before I left, I was shown the stack of paper five-year-old Lamar has filled with drawings: silos, tractors, milk trucks, barns, and even snowplows he's seen. I heard about the English and arithmetic classes some of the kids had been studying, and how the farm is now a fully-organic
operation. As expected, a few references were made to my old news series and other articles Mr. Weaver had followed since. He enjoyed reading them, had been meaning to issue an invitation for some time, he said, and had heard about me from English and Mennonite neighbors quoted in my original series. For whatever reason, he'd remembered that idea Friday and followed through.
I left thinking it may have been little Rachel's celebration, but this Rachel was given the treat.
Unbeknownst to the Weaver family, Friday was my last day as a reporter for the Daily before I move to a new role writing for one of MPN's Monroe County weeklies. A momentary immersion in the Mennonite community again isn't technically "coming full circle," but it was definitely a delightful way to cap my daily career. Simple, sincere, sweet.
Little Rachel will probably never remember her first birthday, but I will never forget it.
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