The joke in our house is that Sydney is slowly reclaiming our yard from lawn, one garden square at a time. 
Sydney has sown carrots in the holes in the concrete blocks he’s put down as edging (wood, we’ve discovered, rots quickly in Kentucky). In this new bed, there are beets for Sydney and blackberries for Erin. Everyone loves the carrots.
Erin
Neither kid is keen on picture-taking at the moment, but Katherine can be leaned on “for the grandparents’ sake.” Nathaniel, however, is quite happy to refuse me even then. Sorry, I tried.
Sydney has one class left to teach this week before the school year wraps up, and then the farmer’s market begins on May 1st. I am squeezing in one more writing project before my sabbatical ends, as the kids stay in school mode through May.
Katherine, however, is leading the way with new things as we look forward to summer. She gets braces next week (cue her famous eye-roll), but she also joined the volleyball league in town and is becoming acquainted with the mental game of playing sports as much as she is court positions and serve posture. After less than a week, she made it clear that she’s not okay with not knowing what she’s doing, and she’s determined to figure it out. So you’ll find us at the park a couple of times a week, as I chase balls and she applies to volleyball some of the discipline she’s learned from music. I try to remind her to lighten up, though I’m also glad to see her so interested. She’s a bit intense . . . to no one’s surprise. Much to my delight, however, when she’s actually playing with her team, she laughs, forgets her self-consciousness, and generally seems to have a good time. And that is fun to watch.
Erin
Katherine likes ceremony, and she thought a picnic on her birthday would make the most of our lovely spring weather. The redbuds in Kentucky are filling every background with pink and purple, and everything has turned green underfoot.
Rain made her reconsider her plan, but she suggested a really nice alternative: a picnic in the greenhouse, where we could hear the rain all around us but keep our food dry. It was a great way to spend an afternoon.
Erin
She threw open the screen door, handed me the egg basket, and announced, “Two eggs. And spiders are floating away off the top of the coop, like in Charlotte’s Web.”
Erin
Just a few weeks after Sydney returned from Nova Scotia, his father, Henry, passed away. Given the current travel restrictions, we weren’t able to attend the funeral in person, but we were able to watch the service online. In the obituary, Sydney captured the extraordinary variety of Henry’s interests and the many people and places he had known in his life. Henry was deeply loved and he will be missed.
Henry D. Penner ~ age 74, of Berwick, N.S., went to his eternal rest on Wednesday, January 20, 2021. Henry was born on March 1, 1946, in Manitoba to Heinrich C. and Aganetha (Dueck) Penner, the second-youngest of nine children. In 1948, he moved with his family to Chihuahua, Mexico, and then in 1958 to what was British Honduras, now Belize, where he worked hard to help carve out a new settlement in the jungle. Despite having to battle the jungle for farmland, he loved the forest and its wildlife, and eventually built up an extraordinary butterfly collection. Henry married Dora Reimer on November 14, 1976. Together, with hard work and dedication, they set out to cultivate a family and homestead. He had a special enthusiasm for fruit trees, and soon assembled a diverse orchard of tropical fruits that included but went far beyond oranges and mangoes. Henry had struggled with ill health earlier in his life, but achieved better health through adopting a healthier lifestyle. He came to feel a calling to share what he had learned with others around him, including by starting a small health food store. He made numerous trips to the United States to buy products from wholesalers there, products which he would then drive back down through Mexico to sell in his store in Belize. Since he had long had misgivings about living in Belize, Henry and his family moved to Nova Scotia in the spring of 1986. The move came with hardships. He lamented the orchard he had to leave behind, and was grieved by the limited friendship opportunities for his family in the early years. Differing property values in Belize and Nova Scotia also entailed years of financial hardship. But Henry and Dora were both blessed with a capacity for hard work and determination, and a new farm took shape in Berwick. The farm even came to include some tropical fruit trees again, this time grown in the protection of a greenhouse. Eventually he also owned a health food store again, with the purchase of Rising Sun Natural Foods. Henry remained a fixture at the store until the last year of his life. He was preceded in death by his wife, parents, brother, Walter D. Penner, and sisters, Elma (Abraham P.) Thiessen, Martha (Daniel D.) Plett, and Maria (Levi L.) Friesen. Henry is survived by his son and daughter-in-law, Sydney and Erin Penner, and grandchildren, Katherine and Nathaniel, of Wilmore, KY; son and daughter-in-law, Nelson Penner and Kira Woolaver, and grandchildren, Allister and Everett, of Berwick, N.S.; brother, Arthur. The funeral service took place at 2:00 p.m., Monday, January 26, in Bethel Mennonite Church, Grafton. Director, Larry Kornelsen and Minister, Rev. Arthur Penner officiated. Interment was in Berwick Cemetery, Berwick. With gratitude the family would like to thank all who have expressed their condolences.
Kentucky has been throwing us for a bit of a loop, weather-wise. Our area endured ice storms in February and we waited a rather anxious week, listening to the tinkling of trees, hoping that the ice would melt before wind and snow arrived. Then came floods all around Kentucky. Today, people walked around with a sort of stunned look as they stepped into sunny, 70-degree weather.
But don’t worry: we are prepared for all kinds of weather. Assuming he has electricity, Nathaniel is ready to bake us some gorgeous bread. He’s been keeping us supplied with rye bread throughout the winter. Our cats also seem quite happy to curl up on the various laps around the house, and the kids are enjoying having cat company while they do math in the morning. And the chickens are keeping us occupied–and out of the house.
Erin
December has been an odd month for our household. With the end of the fall semester, we knew to expect a change in rhythms. And that’s been true: the incessant flurry of emailing and grading has suddenly halted (thankfully!), we’ve sent our students home to their families, and we can look up to assess what remains.
Since I’m on sabbatical for the spring, I have been shifting from adrenaline mode (responding to every new ping on my course management site) to slowly developing the stamina for sustained reading and writing again. Mostly, that meant I fell asleep when I tried reading something, until I finally caught up on rest. Thankfully, the reading is now going much better, and I’m going to try to make the most of the next few months of working at home–even if it can’t be as I first imagined it, with long days in a library and my children ensconced in a school building with their own teachers.
In the first week of school this August, though, we learned that Sydney’s dad was diagnosed with brain cancer. Sydney stayed here for most of the fall, but shortly before Thanksgiving he flew to Nova Scotia, first to quarantine for two weeks, and then to visit his father and brother. Since he left the camera with me, I only have pictures of the kids. But, he and I agree, surely that’s more important than pictures of either of us? The kids have been amused to discover that Sydney and I write back and forth to one another throughout the day, and seeing Sydney’s words appear on the screen usually makes them giggle. They were appalled, however, to learn that we don’t use standard capitalization and punctuation in our messages, and they went on for a good ten minutes about our lack of good writing skills.
I did get a few pictures of the kids on a recent hike (what my kids think of as a forced march), and on Christmas Day. Weekly hikes have been a great source of fun: a safe way to get out and enjoy Kentucky’s mild winters.
Nathaniel complains that he feels short in our house, since he’s not quite able to keep up with his sister, who is now only two inches shorter than me. But it’s clear that both of them are growing rapidly, and I need to be creative to ensure that they get enough opportunities to stretch their legs.
Our paperwhites started blooming on Christmas Eve.
When I reminded the kids that our head tree-wrangler is away, they graciously picked out a slightly smaller, more compact tree.
Katherine gathered pine cones at a recent outdoor meeting of our church small group.
The kids are slowly picking up some of our habits, including a taste for tea. They have a cup of chai with milk each morning, and for Christmas the kids and I kicked it up to hot chocolate. Given the blowing snow and temperatures in the teens, we felt that it was warranted.
Erin
As you can tell from the lack of fall posts, things got busy in our house. Since Sydney and I were grading and responding to student queries, the last thing I wanted to do was to spend one more minute on my computer, even if it was to keep family and friends updated.
I don’t have any pictures of that incessant computer work (probably for the best), or even of the sight that I often marveled at on my non-teaching mornings: walking down the hall of our house around 9am to find each kid at his or her desk in his or her room, deep in school work. We have certainly had our moments of homeschool drama this fall: I hope I never forget the peculiar mingling of horror and fascination in Nathaniel’s eyes as he realized from our conversation that I wanted him to do another draft of his English paper. And I’m starting to think I need to walk into Katherine’s room periodically to mess with her a bit, just so she realizes that she won’t always have a quiet, solitary, un-timed environment in which to work through her math problems in her pretty handwriting. But, overall, I’d say things have gone well. Both kids have really made an effort to take on substantial work in math and reading, with regular shots of history, music, art, Spanish, and geography. For that, I’m truly grateful. I only wish we could celebrate with occasional trips to the planetarium or museum, or concerts. But, well, this isn’t the year for that!
The kids are now joining us in sorting through the mix of work and hobbies that, as all adults know, is more than just “getting your stuff done” so that you can “do what you want to do.” The tidy division between those categories has begun to erode already. Even as Nathaniel gasps in horror if he thinks his school work will take all the way until lunch (he starts early), he may well spend the rest of the afternoon helping me with kitchen and yard work. Which of these things is the “stuff” and which is the “what you want”? As adults who “read for a living” and “have summers off,” Sydney and I are quite ready for those conversations with the kids. Both of them have lent a hand with cooking, and Katherine often steps in to tackle a sink of dirty dishes. Nathaniel is quite proud of his rye crop, which he carefully sorted and stored before he turned to grinding and baking with it. He makes tasty bread.
Despite all that demanded his attention this fall, Sydney made time to order and plant hundreds of bulbs in our front yard. I have always loved spring bulbs, and we all enjoy that shot of color early in the spring. He also ordered a big box of tropical fruit for my birthday. Of all the intriguing things in the box (that flame-colored thing in the bottom right of the picture is a cacao bean), our favorite turned out to be the key limes. We agree that we haven’t come across anything so refreshing!
Sydney’s fall squash crop yielded both great food and front-porch decoration. Nathaniel and I have filled half a deep freeze with frozen squash puree, which we’ve turned into dinner rolls, soup, pizza topping, and much more. This year, we can add eggs to our list of home-grown food. Our six chickens have enjoyed castoffs from the garden produce, and outings (chaperoned by Katherine) into our yard and garden beds. Even today, a 10-degree snowy Christmas Day, they got a baked sweet potato from me in the morning as a treat and offered in return a couple of lovely eggs by the afternoon.
Erin
Katherine and Nathaniel are home 24/7. Like many kids around the country, they’re having to figure out how to occupy themselves–and, thankfully, help out around the house–while their parents get back to work. Sydney and I can largely confine our classes to different days of the week, but the work continues after we come home.
Our kids have both opted to be homeschooled this fall. Their arguments against remote learning were pretty strong, and they both committed to shouldering much of the responsibility for getting through their school work.
With the help of friends, we’ve equipped them with math and Spanish textbooks, and the kids have done well in making those subjects part of their daily rhythm. I’ve set both kids to reading and writing activities (based on books they were already reading), and Sydney’s informal logic workbooks just arrived in the mail (they have cartoons!).
We are jotting down fun and creative family activities we’d like to build in, but a big part of this fall effort is getting the kids to forge ahead with their own work even when their parents are too swamped to check their homework.
The kids have also slowly taken on more responsibilities at the farm and at home. Nathaniel is caring for the cats and chickens, and Katherine has stepped in to help with dishes and picking the tiny cherry tomatoes that are currently abundant at the farm. Both kids are also contributing to cooking: Katherine tends to prefer baking, and can be relied on for a good pan of cornbread, whereas Nathaniel’s signature dish is a big pan of roasted root vegetables. And we’re all making time to drop by the chicken coop in hopes of spying another egg, since the chickens just started laying this week.
Erin
Alan Schmierer
