The Amish

You wanna know something I like about where I live? the Amish people. And as long as I'm telling you how I feel, I might as well add that I've got me a healthy dose of Amish envy. Well, maybe not so much in the winter. This winter we'd see them in their buggies on their way to church and the girls would be buried up to their noses in wool blankets, shiny eyed with the cold. The men would be wrapped to the ears in their black coats with stiff arms slapping their horses. And those poor men - I haven't seen an Amish man yet who has more than 5% body fat. Brrrr.

But we're talking springtime Amish here right now. Today the kids and I went to an Amish nursery that isn't far from our house to pick up some more tomato and pepper plants. On the way we passed several farms with clothes lines full of rough black pants and aprons and blue shirts and dresses, and a few white under-roos as well. They string their lines from a second story window in their house to a slightly higher spot in a barn across the way. For some reason the sight of those clothes hiking uphill in the wind made me wish we had a barn we could heave our clothes toward once a week. The scene gave me a yearning for simplicity.

When we got to the nursery I let the kids out of the car and a sheep dog greeted us, dirty but happy. There were a few women down past the house that were weeding gardens and several children running around happy and barefoot, the girls in bonnets, the boys in straw hats. We went into the greenhouse they had set up and saw the most beautiful plants I have run across this spring. Not one plant looked unhealthy or neglected. I got a hanging basket of petunias that felt like it weighed 20 pounds, ten of which must be from the blossoms. I got tomato plants with little green tomatos already formed on them for fifty cents each. While I was contemplating how much further my cash could take me a little Amish girl, probably about nine or ten, ran down an aisle with balloons for my 4 and 3 year olds and then she asked in her cute pennsylvanian dutch accent, "Would your children like a penny cart ride?" She took them around back and squeezed them onto a little cart with a bench seat just wide enough for all of them. She picked up the reins and slapped the back of a little gray pony and they flew down the road. Oh how I yearned.

Now I don't know if I was romanticizing the whole experience or what, but the women and children looked prettier than average. The men, they wear these scruffy, curly beards so forgive me for not bringing them into the picture, but I swear the women and children carried the beauty that comes with simplicity and goodness. The clothes thing the Amish definitely have figured out. The dresses and the pinned black aprons did nothing to take away from the freshness of the faces of the girls who were wearing them.

When I had the thought pass through my head that I wouldn't mind being an Amishly Mormon girl, I had to wonder if I didn't see being Amish as an opportunity to hide. I would get to hide from clothes, and loudness, and machines, and strangers, and general complication. And I would get to simplify, simplify, simplify - thank you Thoreau. But I know, I know. There is no fleeing life's gereal complications so being Amish most likely isn't the ticket on that one.

But do I think they have a lot figured out about life? I really do. That's why I like having them around.