Earnest Thiessen’s farm loft is the women’s practical meeting place and the setting in which their care for one another becomes inseparable from their decisions about leaving Molotschna. Its workaday furnishings make room for collective deliberation, while its connection to Earnest’s care gives the gatherings an ordinary purpose as well as a more urgent one.

Setting and Arrangement

The women choose the loft over their kitchen tables because kitchens are crowded with children, often in exceptionally large families. In the loft, hay bales support a sheet of plywood used as a table, and milking buckets serve as chairs. Autje Loewen and Neitje Friesen sometimes sit on the window ledge or on saddles brought from Earnest Thiessen’s tack room and set on a beam. The arrangement is improvised, but it makes a working space in which the women can meet without the constant press of household activity.

Work, Care, and Daily Needs

The loft is associated with quilting and with the regular care of Earnest. Greta Loewen explains that the women brought him food and chose to quilt there so they could check on him regularly; the extra room also suited their work. That practical account ties their gathering to the responsibilities of the farm rather than separating it from them.

The meetings also accommodate needs that cannot be put aside for discussion. Pregnant and nauseated, Ona Friesen keeps an empty feed pail beside her. Her pregnancy follows the colony’s assaults, and the elders’ judgment of her as marked by Narfa shapes the prospect that her unborn child will be raised by another family. In the loft, such consequences of the colony’s treatment of women are present alongside the everyday business of sitting and working.

Care also passes directly between the women. During an early, dark gathering, Ona rubs Agata Friesen’s feet in an effort to restore their circulation, while the two sing a hymn together. At another meeting, Agata puts an arm around Salome Friesen as Salome grieves about leaving Aaron behind temporarily; Mejal Loewen, usually at odds with Salome, crosses the plywood table to embrace her. The loft thus holds both the strain of their choices and the gestures by which they sustain one another.

Deliberation and Disagreement

The women use the loft to work through questions that affect who can safely leave. Salome asks why boys aged thirteen and fourteen should be excluded when younger boys may accompany the women and fifteen-year-old boys are already with the men. She also raises the danger that boys could be targeted if accused assailants returned to the colony. Mejal supports the question. The recorder’s answer acknowledges that boys of this age can cause harm, but insists that they remain children who can be taught with direction, patience, and love. The exchange makes the loft a place not only for choosing a course of action but for testing how that choice treats people of different ages and vulnerabilities.

Planning Departure

As the women’s decision takes shape, the loft becomes a staging point for their departure. Agata Friesen asks whether they agree to leave after dark, so they can pass Chortiza Colony and Hiakjeke Colony unseen; the women nod. Later, preparations discussed in the loft expose who may not be able to come: Cornelius will stay because his mother belongs to the Do Nothing women, and he has no choice but to remain with her. Autje and Neitje are distressed, while Agata leaves open the possibility that Cornelius and his mother may change their minds. Mariche Loewen counters that this will not be possible once the men return, when women will no longer be permitted to leave.

The loft’s significance lies in this overlap of ordinary labor, mutual care, and consequential planning. It is a room used to bring food to an elderly man and make space for quilting, but also the setting where the women confront unequal risks, acknowledge losses, and agree on the timing of their departure. The same makeshift table that serves their work becomes the center of a collective decision.