Plain Wisdom (11 page)

Laundry is hung to dry on a clothesline year-round, and depending on the day of the week, clotheslines are often full. In wet weather laundry is either postponed until a dry day or is hung on lines in the basement or on wooden racks inside the home.

During a break from laundry, I went into the kitchen to get a glass of cold water and caught a glimpse of Miriam’s foot-pedal sewing machine. I found this amazing since Amish mothers and daughters make all the outer clothing for everyone in the family, from infants’ gowns to brides’ dresses to burial clothes. (Undergarments and socks are usually store bought.)

My heart turned a flip as I ran my hands across the well-worn oak cabinet. How many pieces of clothing had been sewn on that machine
and for how many years? I didn’t ask. It seemed too private. But I noticed a piece of burgundy fabric lying beside the sewing machine, waiting for her to have time to finish making the dress for her daughter.

At least once a week, Amish mothers will set up an ironing board and iron the cotton shirts. An old-fashioned pressing iron, usually made of cast iron, is heated by placing it facedown on a wood-burning stove or over a low flame on a gas stove. When it’s hot, they iron. When it cools down, they heat it back up. Some Amish women use lighter-weight, modern irons, but they remove the electric cord and heat them in the same manner as an old-fashioned pressing iron.

The delicate organdy prayer caps the Amish women wear are washed by hand and require careful handling and pressing.

A lot of Amish kitchens have two stoves: one gas and one wood. Gas stoves are heated with kerosene (called oil) or propane.

Miriam’s beautiful, shiny, pale green and white wood stove is nearly a hundred years old. She keeps a small box beside it filled with kindling, recycled cardboard boxes, and old newspapers. In winter she keeps the wood stove going all day and cooks meals on it. In spring and fall, she’ll start a small fire in the morning to knock the chill out of the air and to percolate coffee, but by noon she lets it go out. She doesn’t use it at all in summer.

Cooking on a wood stove presents special challenges. There’s no way to turn the heat down, so Miriam moves items to spots where she knows the stove isn’t as hot, or she holds the skillet an inch from the heat while the food finishes cooking. A wood stove’s oven heats unevenly as well. So Miriam times the rotation of each item that’s baking, whether it’s casseroles or meats. She doesn’t even try to bake bread or cookies in the wood stove. That’s a job for the gas stove, which sits just a few feet away.

Miriam uses a stovetop waffle iron, popcorn popper, and percolator. I own a top-of-the-line coffee maker and an electric grinder to grind the coffee beans, but, in my opinion, Miriam’s stovetop percolator makes the world’s best coffee. At home I drink one cup of coffee in the morning and don’t want any more. When I stay with Miriam, I drink about six cups—and always want more! Of course, that’s partly because she cooks breakfast in shifts—a necessity to get everyone fed and out the door on schedule. By the time her youngest ones are off to school, she’s cooked three or four rounds of breakfast, and I’ve enjoyed a cup of coffee and a chat with each group.

Every spring Amish women plant gardens that produce enough vegetables to sustain the family throughout the year. The gardens are tilled by hand or with horse-drawn equipment. If a garden yields too much of any one thing, the women may set up roadside stands and sell their extra produce. If there’s a food they don’t grow themselves, they’ll buy bushels of it from a farmers’ market and can it.

I hadn’t realized that people even can meat until I became friends with Miriam. Her husband and five sons hunt according to the season and bring home meat that she cans for the winter.

Even with all their gardening, farming, and hunting, the Amish do purchase items like toiletries, cereal, sugar, and flour from local grocery stores. Although many homes have the means to make butter, not every family chooses to do so. Whatever they don’t make, they buy.

Miriam has a sister-in-law, Maryann, who bakes dozens of loaves of zucchini bread each week throughout the winter for a famers’ market. So Miriam gives her all her leftover zucchini, and every year Maryann cans between two and three hundred quarts of fresh zucchini.

Here’s Maryann’s zucchini bread recipe.

After my garden is fertilized, plowed, and tilled—which is around the last of March when all chance of frost is past—the fun begins.

Potatoes are the first items I plant. I take a twenty-pound bag of potatoes and cut each potato into fourths, making sure every piece has an eye in it. If the piece doesn’t have an eye, a potato plant won’t grow. Twenty pounds of “potato seed” will feed my family of six all winter long.

Onion sets are planted early too.

Between the middle and end of April, I plant green beans and sweet corn, two fifteen-foot rows of each. A few weeks later I’ll plant a few more rows of corn. Staggering the planting allows us to have fresh sweet corn on the cob throughout the season as well as enough for freezing
for winter use. I don’t can sweet corn because it spoils too easily in jars.

At the beginning of May, I buy my tomato and pepper plants at the local greenhouse. My daughters-in-law start their tomato and pepper plants from tiny seeds. I haven’t had the patience for that art yet. I’m not the aggressive gardener that some of our people are, but I do enjoy gardening. This year I have twelve tomato plants. That should be enough to can dozens of quarts of plain juice and dozens of quarts of both pizza and spaghetti sauce.

Planting and harvesting red beets and cucumbers are a must since we serve them at our church dinners. It takes about eight quarts of pickled beets and eight quarts of pickles for each church meal we host at our home, plus I can extra for our own use.

About that same time in May, or sometimes toward the middle of the month, I plant carrots and zucchini.

Throughout the growing season, the garden requires a lot of weeding, hoeing, cultivating, and more weeding. I like to do the weeding first thing in the morning while it’s cool and I have the most energy.

When there’s a dry spell, I take time each day to water the garden. Our water supply comes from a well on our property. It runs into the home through pipes and out using faucets and spigots. I pull the sprinkler into the garden and let it run for an hour or two each morning and each evening in dry weather, moving the sprinkler to different parts of the garden as needed. I enjoy working in the garden by myself, but if I get behind in weeding, the children help me. Even Daniel and the older boys pitch in on occasion.

The potato plants are dead by mid-August, but the potatoes themselves can stay in the ground and be harvested as needed until mid-September. Most of my garden items—corn, carrots, green beans—stop producing by the end of August, but I’ll usually have fresh tomatoes and peppers until the frost hits in late October or early November.

Although I devote a lot of time to the garden, I know that even the best-cared-for gardens would produce nothing without God’s blessings of
sunshine and rain. That’s another reminder of how helpless we are and how dependent on Him.

When there is an overabundance of a vegetable from my garden, that’s a great time to pull out veggie-friendly recipes. This one is a family favorite.

I’d been married a little more than a year when Tommy did something that absolutely infuriated me. I stood in my kitchen dumping biscuit ingredients into a bowl while he sat in the living room reading the newspaper. It was all I could do to keep from throwing the bowl full of flour and buttermilk across the room—preferably at his head! Instead, I plunged my hands into the dough and mixed with indignation.

I managed to maintain outward restraint, but inwardly I rehashed how wrong he was. My list of grievances grew longer and longer until I thought I was going to explode.

How could he just sit in the next room, enjoying his newspaper, ignoring how wrong he was? He’d made some halfhearted apology without even trying to understand the scope of what he’d done wrong. I slung the dough over, tossed a little fresh flour on it, and pounded my fists into it again.
Can’t he see how wrong he is?
I fumed.