For the third time, my husband Donnie
and I were making a foray into Holmes County, Ohio, home to the second
largest population of Amish families in the United States. To enter
Amish land is to leave the “fast life” behind. No plastic franchise
box stores crowd the crossroads. The byways are narrow, bordered on
both sides with corn creeping out to the verges and two-story, white
houses - distinctive for the lack of electrical lines running to them.
Navigating the thin ribbons, dodging grey buggies, one quickly feels
lost, in a pleasant Twilight Zone sort of way.
So, though we had been there before,
and though Donnie, a former trucker, can usually recall any route he
has previously taken especially if there’s a hot dinner at the end of
it, we gradually realized we needed help to find an eatery. So we
pulled off on a small triangle of cleared land at the edge of a dense
stand of corn, where a young Amish woman had parked her buggy and was
selling handmade baskets.
We disembarked from our car which,
being of the large American variety, looked wholly out of place in the
scene, and Donnie asked the young woman where we could find a “good
Amish restaurant.” The young woman smiled and put on what I would
describe as a “merry face” – though it did not seem even slightly
artificial. Along with giving us what turned out to be precisely
correct directions, she said the following:
“Some people have told me that Miss-riz
Yoder serves good food.
If I have told you right, you will
find it on that road.
I do hope you find it.”
Taken in combination, these statements
conveyed to me a sense that the young lady (I am guessing she was no
older than twenty) had a high value for honesty, modesty, and human
kindness. We later had similar assistance from a teenage girl in an
Amish-run plant nursery – a very literal interpretation of our needs,
a determination to be sure we were satisfied.
Naturally we wanted to buy some of the
buggy girl’s wares to repay her gracious assistance, but I had been
discreetly eyeing the Amish-made baskets and found that we could not
afford even the smallest one, especially with a home back in North
Carolina embarrassingly full of gew-gaws. However, she was also
selling square cardboard punnets of black raspberries. We bought one
punnet for three dollars, and I later regretted we had not bought all
she had. The berries were fresh, ripe, not a single spoiled one
hidden in the bottom – quality through and through. I popped about a
dozen as we followed her directions to “Mrs. Yoder’s Family
Restaurant” where we had such a lunch as gastronomic dreams are made
on, served by pretty young misses in starched white head coverings and
long aprons. We noted that among the customers were many Amish or
Mennonites distinguished by their somber apparel.
Not for the first time, I was under
the Amish spell.
A trip to Lehman’s Store is de rigueur
when visiting Holmes County, and at the check-out counter I saw a
newspaper called The Budget, on sale for a dollar (no tax). I
plunked down four quarters, little knowing what a treasure I had just
procured for so small a price.
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For most of the rest of the day I read
through The Budget, regaling Donnie with its contents. By the
time he got to read it himself, I feared he might be jaded by my
enthusiasm, but he was as enchanted as I. The part of the paper that
most intrigued us was a full 40-page section known as "The Letters."
They came from 34 states and Canada, the Dominican Republic, Belize,
Israel, Ukraine, Honduras, Liberia, Haiti, and Guatemala – places
where the Amish and Mennonites, commonly known as Plain People, have
chosen to hang their flat black hats and fulsome hand-sewn bonnets.
