P. L. Gaus’s Ohio Amish Journal

Cool off in this July heat wave?  Here’s how Amish kids do it.  Enough said.

Do you remember walking home from school?  Do you remember what you wore, or what you carried?  I remember the books – always so heavy.  I remember the homework, even in grade school.  Mostly, I remember the certainty I had, at that age, that this would never change.  I’d somehow always be in school.  Even after my advanced degrees, I still found myself in school, carrying books home.  With homework!  I was a college professor for 31 years.  And I cannot shake the habit of inquiry that settled into me, I guess in the fifth grade.  Maybe earlier.  I suppose that’s why I write.

But here are three kids walking home from school, knowing that this will soon end forever.  Amish children don’t attend any school after the age of sixteen.  Their birthday arrives, and they walk home for good.  School was only something they did while they were still young.  I think there is a profound sense of anchored-in-harbor tranquility in this photograph.  It is foreign to everything I personally have known.  We have careers, life-long goals, and ambitions in the modern world.  Do you catch yourself wondering what it must be like for these children?

The plows are busy in Holmes County, Ohio, and a hard winter is closing its doors.  On Amish farms like this one, they are turning the soil somewhat ahead of the spring rains, hoping to get the fields ready before it is too muddy to work them.  Here two teams were out one recent afternoon, the Amish farmer getting some help from a neighbor fellow who clearly wasn’t Amish.  It will happen like this sometimes, English and Amish working side-by-side, and the cultural mix is fascinating. 

Can you make out what the young fellow is doing as he drives his team?  Right, he’s checking his cell phone.  Isn’t that posture a classic one, in a peculiarly modern way?  That’s what makes Holmes County so interesting to me – the cultural mix is astonishing.  It’s why I will never run out of material for my novels. 

You can read the latest news and reviews on my website: www.plgaus.com.  There is also a schedule of upcoming events.  The seventh Amish-Country Mystery will be published in July this year, and the website has a preview of this novel.  Perhaps I’ll see you at one of my signings or lectures, but in the meantime, I’ll be out in Holmes County, looking for photos like this one.

Would you hang laundry out to dry in winter?  Sure, if you were Amish.  The question is how do you wash it first?  Remember the old ringer-washers?  If the answer is yes, you’ve dated yourself.  The ones I remember were mostly electric, though, and many Amish forsake the use of gasoline generators for such appliances, using only those square galvanized wash and rinse tubs, often with a corrugated washboard and a hand agitator, too:

(http://www.lehmans.com/store/Home_Goods___Laundry).

How does that sound for an afternoon’s labor?  And remember – for a large family, that’s probably every afternoon.

It took a while, but I finally was able to finish constructing my author’s website, and perhaps those of you who have been following my blog will find it interesting.  The launch of my website is timed to precede the release of the new Plume (a division of Penguin Group USA) editions of my stories, which are all going to be re-published as trade paperbacks, beginning on September 28, 2010.  Details of the publication dates are available on my new website.  These Plume editions have been edited lightly to remove a few intemperate words and passages, making them considerably more appropriate for the Christian book market.  The essence of the original stories is all still perfectly intact, so I was pleased with the opportunity to improve the writing.  At any rate, check out the new website at www.plgaus.com, and if you are inclined, use the email link listed under contact information to let me know what you think of it.

 The wheat and barely harvests in Holmes County are well underway, again, and on most farms, one finds a field like this one, where the shocks are out to dry.  It’s quite an amazing thing to watch a family bring in the crop.  Everybody works at it, from grandparents and parents, down to the toddlers.  First, a sheaf is made by laying a bundle of stalks lengthwise, and then tying it in the middle.  One group works at this task.  Then behind them, others gather the sheaves and stand them to make a shock, something like seven to twelve sheaves stood up together.  Father comes last, spreading the last sheaf out over the top to make a cover.  The shocks will stand like that for several weeks, so that the grain can dry and cure in the open air, and a field like this is a common sight this time of summer.  Mostly it is wheat that is done this way, but other grains are also shocked, as is the feed corn in the fall. 

 Such a field plainly marks this farm as Amish, and this one is typical of those in Holmes County, Ohio.  There is a windmill to pump water, and several outbuildings for hay and livestock.  There is also a Daadihaus for the grandparents.  Then, the roofline sports two chimneys, one at the back for the wood stove in the kitchen, and one in the center, for wood stoves, probably on each floor of the house.  But other things mark this as an Amish farm, too.  First, there are no cars and no wires.  There is no TV antenna and no cable service.  It’s hard to see in this photo, but there are several clotheslines near the house, and on the back side of the house, there is the typical shade porch running the full length of the dwelling.  It is all very plain, old-fashioned, and simple, like an Amish farm should be, but to my way of thinking, wheat fields like this one give Holmes County an exotic flavor, in a curiously old-world sort of way.  I never grow tired of seeing it, but I guess you could have predicted that by the fact that I’ve blogged about it before.  It just seems to me that some scenes are worthy of repetition.

The contrast of the modern on the old is quite high in Holmes County, Ohio, just like the contrast of black on white in this photograph.  Here, the old world and the new operate side by side, Amish living separate lives, dispersed among the English of the county, and sharing the roads and towns as if there were nothing unusual about the contrast between the old world and the new.  We who have lived in this part of Ohio don’t even notice the contrast any more.  There seems nothing improbable about the seventeenth century and the twenty-first being interlaced.  The integration of cultures is so successful that we are not surprised to crest a hill on a snowy lane and find a horse pulling a wagon loaded with sacks of grain.  We were out that day with an SUV with four-wheel drive because we thought that was the only way to drive through the deep snow.  Guess we were wrong.

Do you remember recess at school?  Do you remember the swings?  I do, and I remember how I used to pump those swings as high as I could go.  Amish kids are just like that, too.  But here is a pair of girls who have figured out a better angle on pumping a swing – one girl on each side, taking turns to pump from a standing position.  I saw several pairs of girls work this swing that day, taking turns on their way back from the outhouse at the edge of the school yard.  Kids at recess at a one-room Amish parochial school in winter?  They’re just like the kids I used to know – the more air under that swing, the better!

In Holmes County, Ohio, the largest Amish population in the world can be found sprawled across the rolling hills and down in the narrow valleys that so much reminded the first Amish settlers here of their homelands in Germany.  It’s a diverse Amish population, and we have everything from the most conservative Schwartzentruber Amish to the rather more urbane and liberal sects who interact extensively with the non-Amish, or English, population.  Modern conveniences range, according to sect, from the very slight accommodations to modernity that the Schwartzentrubers practice (such as sometimes using Coleman gas lanterns, instead of the more traditional oil and wick lamps), to the use by other sects of sophisticated electronic devices such as phones and computers.  And the “discernments” that make one accommodation agreeable to the Amish – whereas another accommodation is not yet agreeable – can be puzzling to say the least.

One of the nods toward modernity that most makes me chuckle is the neighborhood phone booth, often parked near the road where no one has to admit to owning the thing.  Here is a photograph of one such “neighborhood” Amish phone booth, and right away I suspect you’ll notice the most astonishing aspect of the thing.  Right, you got it.  That’s a solar panel mounted to the side of it.  Inside, there is a phone with an answering machine, and a fax machine, too.  Once you know what you’re looking at, you’ll begin to spot hundreds of these little phone booths peppered around the county.  Some are quite nice, and others are nothing more than little roofed enclosures attached to the back side of a barn.  I know one Amish fellow who has a phone mounted to a tree some hundred yards back into a stand of timber, so nobody can see it.

So there is progress in Holmes County.  Slow progress to be sure, but measurable nonetheless.  Who knows?  Maybe one day we’ll see radio-controlled airplanes for the kids to play with.  No, wait – I’ve already seen that.  Go figure.

In my Ohio Amish Mysteries, soon to be republished as the Amish-Country Mysteries by Plume (a division of Penguin Group USA), the old red-brick Holmes County Jail is featured prominently, and I thought my readers might like to see what it looks like. Here is a picture taken just a few years ago, after Holmes County moved its real jail to a modern facility in the countryside north of town.

Just inside the main door to the right is where I placed Ellie Troyer-Niell’s front counter, and that window on the first floor at the right corner of the building is where I put Sheriff Bruce Robertson’s large office. Many of my characters (Professor Michael Branden, the sheriff, and Pastor Caleb Troyer) have stood looking out from that window, to think or talk about a case.

The rest of courthouse square is taken up by the sandstone courthouse (off-camera to the left) and the tall civil war monument (off-camera to the right), and I’ll soon post photographs of those, too, so you can see the locations where many of my Millersburg scenes are set. In months to come, I’ll try to post photos of other scenes from my novels.