Richie and I had been living in the rented house with the four-plant tobacco crop for two years when he began to search for land to build a house on. He studied plots in the clerk’s office, on maps and from the cockpit of a small plane, and eventually found a southward-facing slope with a copse of trees. He calculated that the land would be within driving radius of my patients and determined that it could not be used for farming. Richie refused to build on land that an Amish farmer could make good use of.
Standing on the slope, we looked over a ribbon of a tossing green cornfield, to a tobacco plot dotted with fat-leafed bouquets and, beyond that, to an effervescent band of alfalfa. A pasture lay to the east. At a neighborly distance was a farmhouse, two barns, a silo and a windmill. Beyond them, more fields lapped into the distance, interrupted only by an occasional farmhouse. We could see miles across the gentle valley to the hills.
An Amishman, the one who followed his team of horses across the flow of fields below the woods, allowed us to buy this piece of his land.
Richie meant to make the basic design of the house himself. He stuffed rolls and rolls of flimsy paper under his arm and disappeared into the back room, and hours, or days, later he’d come out with pencil drawings of houses with turrets and houses with sunken bathtubs and houses with circular staircases. Timidly, I’d talk to him about them, offering praise and suggestions here and there. Richie’d go back and erase things and make more drawings. He flew out to California to see some houses he’d read about. He made more drawings. He made them into a series of blueprints.
I kept quiet.
One night, after he’d spent months and months in the back bedroom drawing and redrawing on the flimsy paper, Richie woke up, jumped out of bed, went to his drawing board and destroyed everything. The drawings were wrong, he said. He had been designing houses for someplace else. He had to go back to the beginning and make a house for Amish country.
The Amishman does not impose himself on his piece of land because, in a fundamental way, he does not really own it, not the way English own property. Instead, he considers himself its steward. It is his privilege to live on it; the land is in his trust during his lifetime. He is so serious about being a faithful steward that he nurtures his earth, he brings forth the harvest of its own disposing, he tends the land until it glows with contentment. It’s just his work, his assignment, he would say, coming from Genesis. He, the Amishman, follows God’s design; he is supposed to ‘replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.’ (Genesis 1:28) And so he believes he does.
But to me, he doesn’t ‘have dominion’. Dominion means dominating; running the thing, being the king. Americans, crashing through the forests, tilling the plains to dust, fishing the seas empty, assumed that the earth was their dominion; that it was theirs to do with just as they pleased.
The Amishman follows the earth; it tells him when to rise and when to sleep; it tells him what he can and can’t plant and when. The Amishman treats the land sensitively – he nourishes it with horse and cow manure; he treads on it lightly – with teams of animals instead of machinery that packs it down. He works it often by hand. The Amishman’s fields flourish because he pays close attention to them, because he is sensitive to the earth, because he lets it guide him.
I don’t know how many times he crosses his rows in a year or in a lifetime, but each time he crosses he pays attention. When he and his horses pull a blade over the field, he bends from the waist to see the dirt being sliced. He learns from being the earth’s bedfellow in all seasons. Because he is sensitive to the earth, it is abundant and beautiful.
In the same way that an Amishman discovers the best in his land and helps it produce, Richie found the house in himself, from the people who were our neighbors and from the land around us.
A crew of ten Amishmen built the passive solar, post-and-beam house Richie finally designed. The Amish contractor had built 20-odd barns or so and knew post-and-beam barns better than anyone in the county; he didn’t have so much experience with houses, but he allowed he’d ‘just tell the boys it’s a house and not a barn.’
The roof line follows the slope of the hill and the shape of the woods around it. Looking up at it from the road below, the house seems like it belongs, like it settled in centuries ago. From Reuben’s farm, it’s barely noticeable – especially now, as the trees grow up in front of it. We keep our lamps turned from the windows, so that the Amish darkness is not disturbed by our show of electricity.
The living room, which takes its shape from an octagonal framework of oak beams, spreads in a low apron out towards the rows of corn and into the woods. Since the room is bounded floor to ceiling on four sides by oak-framed glass, the sun and light move almost freely in it as they do beyond its windows. At the autumn equinox, the sun rises precisely at the easternmost window and sets at the westernmost. The ceiling is webbed by the golden oak beams, which radiate out from a massive stone column. Pine planks form the ceiling proper. In the center of the house we have a two-story atrium, which gives light to the underground portions of the house and makes my indoor plants content. The house stays cool in the summer and we don’t start the coal stove until late in October.
The rooms have a unique shape – shapes so distinct that I believe they are more natural to Richie than square rooms.
Each room is white, each has a pine ceiling, each has been bisected at angles with oak beams. Windows reflect in windows. Angled beams, posts, and dowels cast and pass, one over the other, triangular shadows, pentagonal shadows, square shadows and shadows of leaves. The house lets in mist and sun, dusty colors from the plowed fields; snow laces the skylights, lightning often freezes for an instant on the white walls.
The house’s structure – those muscular oak beams – give me protection and distance from the demands of practice. Each time I come in, I feel like I am entering a silent cave with a broad opening facing only the fields and forests.
It’s right for Richie and me here. Neither of us cares much for the city. When he gets back from a trip (Richie’s now flying 727s, and I think no other man could imagine how happy he is to be doing it), he works on the house. Slowly he is completing the finishing work upstairs; this last summer he labored at a rock wall. For myself, I put in a garden, put up green tomato mincemeat and the like; I cook, sew some, decorate. I go to quiltings and Tupperware parties with my Amish neighbors. We both play with the dogs and when they have puppies I am, naturally, a wreck for weeks.
Sometimes we’ll take off on short romantic interludes: once Richie kidnapped me for a day – having worked out an arrangement with my backup doctor to cover for me – and took me to New Orleans for a ‘proper creole dinner’. Sometimes we’ll go to Dallas to roust with Richie’s old friends or we’ll meet in New York for brunch. The truth is, though, for both of us, the excitement crests not when we’re there, but when we see the first horse and buggy on the roads leading towards home.
I can’t imagine not being married to Richie. I believe it’s the same for him. I suppose it was settled that day when I came out here to practice five years ago. I acceded not only to whatever force it was that put me here, but also, a little bit, to the idea that there are things in life that must be and that the only wise action is to accept them.
As our marriage has grown, I suppose both of us came to accept that it simply is. We are fortunate, I suppose, in that both of us have work that means so much to us; it makes it natural to respect and support the other’s work.
Richie has never let me down, never complained about my work – as disruptive to our daily lives as it is. He’ll have to get up at four to get a flight and, without fail, that’s the night the phone will ring all night long. He doesn’t say anything or show annoyance – he’ll either roll over and go right back to sleep or stay semi-awake and follow the unfoldings.
He has a record of heroic efforts: for example, he’s rescued me from snowbanks at three o’clock in the morning, and once, by means unknown to me yet, he found me at an obscure intersection in order to tell me that my radio had broken down and a call had come in for a delivery.
One night I was finishing one delivery when the call came in for another. Since I was near home, I decided to stop there and return the father’s call. As I walked in the door – it must have been two-thirty or three in the morning – I saw Richie, standing in his pajama bottoms in the middle of the kitchen. ‘Uh, gosh, Aaron,’ he was saying, ‘I don’t know much more about these things than you do, but if you think it would help, I’d be glad to come over.’