Recognition by sound, by sight

Here's another story as I told it at a storytelling event with friends.

My mother (left) with sister.

My story is about recognition.  How we recognize each other.  How we’re connected to each other.  By sight, by sound, by handwriting, by smells.  I have three short stories that weave together about some women in my family—my mother, my great-aunt the Roman Catholic nun, and me.  These are intergenerational stories about how the three of us are connected.

I.                   Recognition by sound

My mother, born in Germany, was named for her aunt the nun who entered a cloister as a teenager.  It was a very strict order of nuns called the Poor Clares, and people living outside the convent walls were not permitted to have direct eye contact with the nuns.  The nuns were allowed infrequent family visits on specific days.  My grandfather took my mother with him for these visits, since my mother was named for her aunt.  They shared a name, and when my great-aunt took her vows, she chose the new name Maria Hugo.  So, my mother’s name became a special link to her aunt’s previous life.  The visits occurred in a special chamber, and a curtain was hanging between the visitors and the nun so they could not see each other.  My mother came to know her aunt by the sound of her voice.  I’ve often marveled at the fact that her family recognition of her aunt came through sound and not by sight.

II.                Recognition by sight

Conversely, my interaction with my great-aunt was in the absence of sound.  It was only by sight.  When I was about eight or ten years old, my great-aunt moved closer to my grandparents in Germany.  (I want to point out that in post WWII Germany, she was no longer cloistered.)  As a child, my family often visited my grandparents in Germany during the summer.  At that age, I had started to lose my conversational abilities in German, my first language.  My great-aunt spoke no English, and as a formerly cloistered nun, she spoke little by habit.  I remember that she looked very forbidding in her black and white nun’s habit, and we did not speak when she visited because of a language barrier.  I was a little afraid of her. 

One day, she grabbed me by the hand and took me out back in the garden.  She pulled me along through the chicken coop behind the wood shed, into the asparagus beds.  I didn’t know what she was doing, what she wanted, and stumbled to keep up with her.  Remember when I said I was a little afraid of her?  When we got to the asparagus beds, she reached down to grab the hem of her gown and started lifting up.  I think my eyes were as big as saucers.  I did not know what to expect.

The first thing I thought was, “Nuns wear pants?!”  She wore pants under her nun’s habit.  That was quite unexpected.  The hem went higher.  There in her leather belt was a knife.  I thought, “Nuns carry knives?”  That was a shock!  She pulled the knife out from her belt….and showed me how to cut the asparagus.  Phew!  That was a relief to know what we were doing out there behind the woodshed with a knife.  This was the traditional white German asparagus, called “weiss spargel,” where the asparagus beds are hilled so that the stalks never turn green in the sunlight.

After harvesting the asparagus, she cut two long stalks of rhubarb.  We walked back into the coop.  She looked me straight in the eye, sucked sour juice from the end of the rhubarb stalk, and spit the juice at the chickens.  I did the same.  So, we stayed out in the chicken coop for awhile sucking sour rhubarb juice and spitting it at the chickens.  I remember thinking, “My great-aunt the nun has taught me how to spit….nobody is going to believe this story.”  This entire experience was in the absence of speech, which is so different from my mother’s story about her aunt. 

III.             Recognition by sound

The next story is about my great-aunt after the war ended.  Her cloister had been disbanded.  She  lived in eastern Germany which was divided by Poland and the Czech Republic as part of post war reparations.  It’s interesting that my mom’s family spoke German, Polish, Czech, and Russian.  At that point, up to 15 million people left their homes and headed west.  My great-aunt finally ended up in Westphalia, a British occupied zone in western Germany.  She was now hundreds of miles from her home, which she left on foot.  She was helping care for the sick and elderly, orphans, other displaced people.

After a bitter cold winter in ~1948, it was a beautiful sunny May day, and she had some rare time off, so she took a walk.  She walked all the way to the next village, and it was so beautiful and sunny that she kept walking until she came to the next village.  She just couldn’t stop walking, it felt so good.  By this time she realized it was quite late and needed to head back.  So, she swung by the train station to see what time it was.

She saw a group of kids playing at the train station, and she paused to ask them what time it was.  That’s when my mother turned to her and said, “You’re my aunt.”

That still gives me chills.

Remember, they had never seen each other, as my great-aunt was cloistered long before my mother was born and they were not permitted to see each other during limited visitation.  They were hundreds of miles from home, and the last time they had spoken with each other had been about 2.5-3 years.  My mother was a young teenager at this time.  She too had left home on foot.

So, back to the encounter.  My great-aunt immediately asked my mother her name, where she was from, who her father was.  This chance encounter at the train station was how they were reunited, reunited by my mother recognizing her aunt’s voice.  This story for me is one of the epic stories of my family.  I have thought about this encounter many long hours.  I’ve wondered what the slim chances were for my great-aunt to be reunited with the child who was named for her in this extraordinary way.  Thinking about it for long whiles has certainly challenged my belief system and forced me to think about what my belief system even is.

Thinking about this convergence of stories, recognition by sight, by sound, remains for me an enduring experience of family connections, and that’s the image that I hope to leave with you this evening.