This is a biography of a Mennonite woman and several generations of her people of Philadelphia into whose family I was born. My involvement with them was never required, but always voluntary. From the age of seventeen I was drawn more and more into the sphere of their views of life, being nonviolence, service and the agrarian. I took tangential approaches to these perhaps, but at the age of eleven took the oath never to kill. This was, as they say, an anointing before I ever knew of such. I sought and served on the faculties of two Black colleges in this life, receiving tenure at the last. Now they are called HBCUs, I became a gardener and herbalist, ran the the Experimental Drug and Herb Garden of UT-Austin, wrote a work on native plants, was involved in the restoration of overgrazed wilds. These are my claims to being Mennonite beyond the elusive affiliation. I wrote this book to work to prove to this Mennonite woman, my Aunt, that it matters if another feels the same longing we do. Since she was a trained artist watercolorist, but not celebrated, a woman who but for poverty, the age (she was born in 1910) and gender would have aspired to be a surgeon, I wanted to show her in the last years of her 94 that even if the quest for beauty contains contradiction in mortal conflicts, there is indeed the promise fulfilled. So I was a poet who married a physician and founded a medical practice to her great joy, all the while shuttling back and forth to Philadelphia to aid and visit, and engaging in long telephone with this 90 year beloved. Her watercolor canvases are stretched in the great freedom from oneself in the negative space of the road not taken. This is an account of a.Pennsylvania Dutch radical Mennonite watercolor artist intellectual and New York buyer for her department store, an archivist and curator. Her conversations advocate absolute soul liberty in the integrity of folk life. Through her the bygone worlds of Germantown, Philadelphia, Skippack, Salford, Oley and surroundings became realities. I have written extensively of these worlds back to 1717 and of the families and peoples and the lives they sustained.
The search for beauty here starts among her watercolors. A participation mystique of the natural opens a door into those minds sometimes architectured like a Rilke sonnet. Natural events and objects describe spiritual conditions. All this is told against a family background of many generations of Mennonite pastors in the areas of Skippack, Salford, Hereford; it is told from inscriptions in classic pietistic texts, from burial inventories and gravestones, from names embroidered on show towels, from chests and plants and especially from notes, recollections and memories of 19th century survivals surrounding the first Palatinate peoples there from 1709, 1717 and before.