Getting a Home Ready for Church

Warm greetings from our Amish community here in the Heartland. It was a gray week here, cloudy from one end to the other, with showers coming through often enough that nobody bothered looking for the sun anymore. There was no haying to be done, and no one seemed to mind much. The families have turned their attention to putting up silage now, and the chopping goes on whether the sky is bright or not. There is something settling about the quiet of a wet week, the sound of rain on the barn roof and everyone a little closer to home than usual.

This week’s letter continues our series on the Amish way of working together, and this time we look at something that happens in a home rather than a field. When a family’s turn comes to host church, the neighbors arrive to help get the place ready.

Amish worship is held in homes rather than in a church building, and each family takes a turn hosting. When that turn comes around, there is a great deal to do, and nobody is expected to do it alone. A word goes out that a work day is needed, and the neighbors come.

One woman remembers her first one clearly. She was small, and the neighbors came to clean their house because church was to be held there. What stayed with her was the feeling when everyone walked in the door. A busyness fills the air right away, with the hostess handing out lists or calling out who should take which job. Nobody stands around wondering what to do.

The work itself is straightforward. Whatever has not been done yet gets done. Floors, windows, walls, and every corner that does not get a hard cleaning in the ordinary run of a year. Even the china comes out of the hutch to be washed, and ask around and the women will tell you that is where the talk gets going. Standing at the sink with a sister or a neighbor, passing dishes back and forth, it is hard not to visit. Some of the best conversation of the whole day happens with hands in the dishwater.

The children are not left to run loose. They get jobs of their own, small ones fitted to their size, and that is how they learn what is expected. No one sits them down for a lesson about it. They are simply handed a rag and put to work alongside everyone else, and by the time they are grown they know exactly what a work day looks like.

The hardest part is rarely the cleaning. It is the furniture. The benches for the service have to fit, and that means moving things out and rearranging whatever is left until there is room for everyone to sit. In a smaller home it takes some figuring, and more than one family has stood in a doorway measuring with their eyes before deciding the sofa has to go upstairs.

For some, the best work is in the kitchen. One mother said mixing the peanut butter spread for Sunday’s lunch and baking the date pudding for the evening meal means more to her than any amount of scrubbing. The food matters, and she likes being part of it. Lunch on the work day itself is potluck, with everyone bringing something along.

The quietest moment of the whole day comes at noon, when the blessing is asked. All the movement stops at once, the talk falls away, and for a few seconds there is nothing but a room full of people with their heads bowed. Then the plates start around and the noise comes back.

The stories that get told afterward are the small ones. One woman still smiles about the day her sister was hosting and not expecting her, and she came anyway in the afternoon and walked in the door. The look on her sister’s face was worth the trip.

Nobody keeps a ledger on these days. Appreciation is shown by helping in return when the next family’s turn comes, and it always does. Ask the women here what all those years of work days taught them and the answer comes back the same. "Many hands make light work," one of them said, and she has seen it proven in every kitchen in the district.

Stories from Our Amish Basket Weavers

Here are a few of the most notable moments from the families who weave the beautiful baskets featured on AmishBaskets.com , shared with us this week.

The Swarey Family

Three babies arrived in the community inside of five days this past week, which set more than one household looking for help. The Swareys’ middle daughter has gone out as maid to one of the new mothers and will be there a good while yet. Maid duty means she takes the house over entirely, the cooking and the washing and the little ones underfoot, so the mother can rest and tend the baby and nothing else. She is young for it, but she has watched her own mother run a household her whole life, and she stepped into the work like she had been doing it for years.

The Borntrager Family

The Borntrager girls have a chore that comes before all the others. First thing every morning one of them opens the henhouse door and lets the laying hens and the fryers out into the day, since the birds are shut in overnight where the critters cannot get at them. That part goes the same every morning. What changed this week is where the fryers took themselves off to. They found their way across to a neighbor’s garden and went to work on the tomatoes, and now there is talk of keeping them penned a while longer and feeding them more corn instead. They have been at the tomatoes in their own garden too, but with all the rain there have been plenty this year, and nobody in that house is counting what the chickens carry off.

"If everyone sweeps before his own door, the whole street would be clean."

- Amish Wisdom Overheard in the Community.