Getting Ready for the Big Days

Warm greetings from our Amish community here in the Heartland. Summer took its leave for good this past week. A steady rain came through last Sunday and dropped the temperature twenty degrees behind it, and by Monday morning the jackets were coming down off the pegs by the door for the first time since Spring. Fall arrived on the calendar Tuesday and looked the part, with nights down near fifty and the first thin smoke rising from a few chimneys before breakfast. The back half of the week turned bright and dry, and the silage wagons ran from morning to dark under the kind of clear September sky that makes the work feel lighter than it is.

This week’s letter continues our series on the Amish way of working together, and with wedding season not far off, the timing is right to look at how the families get ready for a big event. An auction, a wedding, a funeral, a school benefit. Any one of them can bring several hundred people to a farm in a single day, and every one of those people will need to be fed.

One woman traced her first memory of it back to when she was ten years old. Her family was leaving for another state, and before they could go there had to be a moving auction to sell off everything that would not make the trip. She remembered the house turned inside out for weeks and the worry that ran through the kitchen over how much food to make for the crowd that was surely coming. Then the day arrived and the crowd was smaller than anyone had figured. The food went a long way, and the family left with less to carry than they had feared. She still calls it the most memorable event she ever helped with, partly for the auction itself and partly because it was the last thing she did in the only home she had known.

There is no chart hanging on the wall for deciding who does what. Everyone in a district knows who is good at what, one mother explained, and the jobs fall into place from there. The woman who makes the best pies is put on pies. The man who can keep a schedule and a crowd moving is put at the front. Children are simply assigned a task, the same as they are for a church work day, and they grow up knowing where they fit.

The talk, though, always circles back to one question. How much food? The women can go around on it for days. One says four hundred plates and another says five, and somebody always remembers the year the rolls ran out before the second sitting. Deciding how much to cook for a crowd whose size no one can know ahead of time is the great puzzle of every event, and nobody has solved it yet.

Whatever the answer, mashed potatoes and gravy will be on the plate. That is the dish that turns up at nearly every big gathering here, made in quantities that would frighten a restaurant cook, peeled and mashed the morning of by a whole line of women working shoulder to shoulder. The quietest job belongs to whoever is dicing vegetables in a corner, a task that asks for nothing but a sharp knife and steady hands, and that some women prefer for exactly that reason.

Something always runs short. It might be the pickles or it might be the pie, but somewhere in the afternoon a dish will come back empty with people still in line. The families plan for it. Someone is put on call to make a run to town for more if the crowd turns out bigger than expected. And yet the surprising thing, as one woman put it, is that most of the time the food holds. "We worry ourselves sick over it," she said, "and then there is plenty."

Ask about the most meaningful event and one mother did not hesitate. Her son’s wedding. Months of preparation, the whole district turning out to help, and a day she still cannot talk about without stopping to gather herself. That is the one that stays.

When it is over and the benches are loaded back on the wagon, no one sends a thank you note. The thanks come later, when the next family has an auction or a wedding of their own and the same faces show up at their door, aprons on, asking how much food they figure they will need.

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 Yoder Family

In the Yoder home, Mom reported that the first weeks of school seem to be wearing on their youngest scholar. The first grader has been taking an unusually long time to change out of her school clothes in the afternoons, and when Mom went up to see what was keeping her, she found her stretched out on her bed doing nothing at all. "I just want to be by myself for a while," the little one told her. "Don’t tell the other girls where I am." Mom said she left her to it and went back down to the kitchen, where the youngest sister had been waiting at the window since noon for her playmate to come home.

The Mast Family

The Mast family told us their boys came home from school this week with a treasure. Three of them had spotted a pink balloon in the ditch along the road, likely escaped from one of the new baby celebrations in the community, and it said "It’s a girl!" in big letters across the front. Mom said it has been the center of every game since, and that she looked out the kitchen window one afternoon and found all three of them up on the low roof of the porch, chasing that balloon from one end to the other. One of the boys had a sore foot from where the pony stepped on him a week or so back. She had been doctoring it along, but from the look of him up on that roof, it has healed.

"Our duty is not to see through one another, but to see one another through."

- Amish Wisdom Overheard in the Community.