COLUMN: Viewpoint – A building’s soul

Recently an architecturally and historically significant Mennonite girls school built in 1904 in Ukraine was destroyed by a Russian bomb. People went online to express their sorrow and share stories about family connections to the beloved school. The place had been more than just a building to them.

It made me recall an architect I once interviewed. He believed buildings had souls, something intangible beyond their outward frame that made them special, important and memorable.

Recently I’ve noticed that more and more buildings are disappearing in Steinbach, buildings which played a key role in my life during the five decades the city was my home.

I spent two years attending classes in the white wooden Kornelson School building which stood where the current city hall is located. The building is gone, but I won’t forget the kindness my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Mary Kihn, showed me when I was a new kid in town and feeling lost, or the way she helped mathematics make sense to me for the very first time. I won’t forget the way my fourth-grade teacher, Miss Esther Toews, made us memorize the long poem The Song My Paddle Sings by Mohawk poet Emily Pauline Johnson. I can still recite the whole thing from memory more than 60 years later.

Our family’s first Steinbach home on Highway 12 has been replaced by an apartment block, but I won’t forget my birthday parties there when the living room, decorated with balloons and streamers, was filled with neighbourhood friends. Our kitchen table held a bevy of gifts and featured a special cake my mom had made. I won’t forget how my mother read my sister and me the book Susie’s Babies in her bedroom in that house. The book was a gentle way of introducing young kids to information about sex and the reproductive system. When she was finished reading it, Mom told us she was pregnant with my baby brother. How blessed I was to have a mother who provided valuable vital knowledge about such an important aspect of life.

Grace Mennonite Church, a little white building on the corner of First and Lumber, was my spiritual home for some 20 years. I was baptized there. My husband and I were married there, and our two sons were dedicated to God there after they were born. The church is no longer standing, but I won’t forget the kindness the congregation showed our family when my mother was diagnosed with cancer. They provided rides to medical appointments, food, prayer and moral support to see our family through that crisis. I won’t forget singing in the junior choir there with Shirley Bestvater as my director. It helped lay the foundation for many other musical ventures.

Steinbach’s 5¢ to $1 Store on Main Street is gone but I won’t forget my excitement in late August when my Mom and I would go through its doors to purchase all the things on my school supply list for the coming year. I loved school and a trip to the 5¢ to $1 Store was the sign classes would soon begin.

When I drive through Steinbach now, I often take note of the many places that were a part of my past that are no longer there. It makes me a little sad. I know however that the souls of those edifices aren’t gone. The life lessons I learned in those buildings, the people who touched my lives in those places, and the important milestones in my life I marked in those structures, are still part of me, and always will be.