The Blessings of Working Together

Warm greetings from our Amish community here in the Heartland. It was a soft, showery week here for the most part, with the lanes staying dark and the wash hanging inside more often than out. October arrived on Thursday, and the corn is standing ready in the fields, waiting on a few dry days for the picking to begin in earnest.

This week’s letter brings our series on the Amish way of working together to a close. Over the past ten weeks we have looked at barn raisings and quilting days, at youth work groups and church work days. We have seen the care given to widows and the way a whole district turns out to feed a wedding crowd. This week we asked a simpler question. What do all of those traditions leave behind in the people who grow up inside them?

The answer starts young. One woman traced her earliest memory of the community pulling together to her family’s auction when she was ten, a day she has spoken of before and one she clearly has not stopped thinking about. Children here are put to work alongside everyone else from the time they can carry a bucket, and by the time they are grown they have learned to help wherever help is needed without waiting to be asked. "They learn to help where needed," one mother said, and she did not seem to think there was anything more to explain.

More than one woman named the same lesson as the one that shaped her most as an adult, and it was a humbler one than we expected. She learned to ask for help when she needed it. Growing up watching neighbors show up for one another teaches a person that needing a hand is nothing to be ashamed of, and that saying so out loud is how the whole thing works. One woman said the moment she felt the strength of the community most clearly came in a meeting, when the district reached agreement on a hard question and everyone walked out pulling the same direction.

Outsiders sometimes picture all of this as charity flowing one way. The families here would tell you it runs in a circle. People help knowing they will be helped in turn, and there is no shame in that expectation. It is what holds the whole arrangement together. The most meaningful lesson these traditions teach, one woman said, is that you must be willing to help in return. Nobody keeps a ledger, but everybody keeps their end.

When hard times come, and they do come, the help is usually there before anyone has finished asking. A crop lost, or a long illness in the house. The district simply closes in around the family until the worst is past. New families feel it the day they arrive. There is usually a big crowd waiting to help unload the truck and get the furniture set where it belongs, and a potluck lunch spread out before the last box is carried in. A family can go to bed that first night in a house that already feels lived in, surrounded by neighbors whose names they learned that afternoon.

The most surprising part, more than one woman told us, is how often help shows up unasked. One still remembers a friend who came by the day she was taping and mudding drywall in a new room. The friend looked the wall over, then picked up a knife and went to work beside her without a word about it. Nobody had asked. That afternoon, she said, is the heart of the whole thing.

Friendships grow out of that. Working shoulder to shoulder year after year binds people together in a way that visiting alone never quite manages, and the feeling of being connected to something larger than your own household is what keeps a person rooted. Ask what has changed the least over the years and the answer is the tradition itself, the holding on to how things have always been done. That is what carries the community from one generation to the next. Each family provides for the needs of the others, and their children watch, and then their children do the same.

And the lesson these women hope future generations remember most? One of them put it in a single phrase, and it is as good a place to end this series as any. It is the blessings of working together.

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 Borntrager Family

Readers may remember the Borntrager fryers that found their way into a neighbor’s tomato patch a few weeks back. Mom reported this week that the matter has been settled for good. After a Summer spent running the farm on their long legs chasing insects, the two fryers weighed in around six and seven pounds and went to the butchering block a little sooner than she had planned. There was chicken for supper that night and bags of it in the freezer for later. No sooner was that done than some English friends down the road brought over a dozen of their old laying hens that have quit laying reliably, so Mom has a day of butchering and canning chicken stock ahead of her.

The Swarey Family

The Swarey family told us that Mom’s brother and his wife took their three little ones on a trip down to Arkansas this past week, along with two of Mom’s sisters and one sister’s baby. They went to see an aunt who has been ill, and another of Mom’s brothers who moved his family down there this Summer. The Ozark hills and curves did not agree with the youngest travelers, and all three were carsick by the time they arrived. The pizza and ice cream picked up along the way helped bring them around. Visits with the aunt had to be kept short, so they made sure to stop in twice, once that evening and again the next morning on their way home.

"Hands build houses, love builds homes."

- Amish Wisdom Overheard in the Community.