Sitting in a modern engine-driven combine gave me a high like I was on drugs or something. Never in my life had I thought I would be doing anything in a field without the use of horses, but the summer after I escaped from the Amish I jumped at the opportunity to work on a farm in North Dakota. I was thrilled to drive a combine to harvest wheat. Working with equipment other than horses was a new and exciting challenge for me, and I took the opportunity to do something crazy before I started a new semester in college.
I had no problem learning how to drive the enormous piece of machinery; I only weighed 105 pounds, which made me feel like a little rat sitting in the huge tractor. However, after a couple days of practice, I drove the combine like a pro. At home, the whole family would spread out into the wheat field and set up bundles of freshly-cut wheat in shocks (little huts). It was hard work to pick up and carry those bundles, but we had to do it so the bundles could dry out before being fed into the thrashing machine powered with a big engine with a long belt connected to the thrasher.
When I was still at home, I had always been more of an outside farm girl than a stay-in-the-house girl. I wondered how I could now drive a combine when I had all kinds of trouble guiding horses when I was younger. I loved being out in the barn milking the cows early in the mornings, or feeding the chickens and gathering eggs in the late afternoons. While I enjoyed those chores, I was also glad to hand those chores over to somebody else. In my house, the chores dribbled down the line as each child grew old enough to do them. The girls started by doing housework, such as cooking, cleaning, and taking care of babies, then graduated to doing chores out in the barn, which consisted mostly of milking cows and feeding chickens. The boys did the rest of the work, but they never helped with housework, which the Amish considered girls’ work. Once my younger siblings grew old enough to take care of these kinds of chores, I began helping with my family’s main income: weaving baskets.
Besides weaving baskets at the age of twelve, I got the part time job of driving a team of horses during the haying season. The idea thrilled me! However, my brothers were not too enthused because they thought I was just a flimsy sister who needed to stay in the house where women belonged.
On one hot summer day, I stood high on the wagon headboard driving a team of Belgian horses through the long rows of freshly-raked hay. I had to make sure the hay loader hooked onto the back of wagon was raking it up. Jacob, my younger brother, Sam, and the hired hand, Menno, stacked the loose hay with forks as it came up the loader. I wanted to prove to my brothers I was strong and could handle anything. Of course, when I was trying to prove my boyish skills, something always went wrong, and this time was no exception. While standing tall and breathing in the fresh smell of cut hay, something suddenly frightened the horses and they bolted. Unfortunately, my big girl panties were just not big enough to handle the spooked horses. I screamed for help while yanking the reigns with all my strength. Menno dashed forward from the back of the wagon and grabbed the lines from me, but it was too late. The huge load of hay slid off the wagon, dragging my brothers and I with it, burying us as we hit the ground.
No one got seriously hurt, just some bumps and bruises, but it shook us all up. The boys blamed me for making the horses run away. I do not know how I scared them, unless they saw my dress flapping around from the wind. More likely the boys did not like me driving, so they blamed me for the runaway regardless, so I would quit driving. So I did. I did not drive any more for the rest of the haying season, and the bad luck did not end there; it followed me around for the next several years.
§
The next incident occurred soon after I finished school, when I was around fourteen years old. Everyone only received an eighth-grade education, then we stayed home and worked full time. At fourteen, my parents allowed me to go to town without another adult to run errands. On this particular day I had to go to the hardware store to buy some supplies for our basket shop. I took my two-year-old sister, Lizzie, with me so Mem could get a little break.
I drove a horse named Smokey. He was supposed to be safe for the girls to drive, but as he walked through town he suddenly spied a water sprinkler in someone’s yard. With no warning, he threw his head up and took off galloping down the street. This was so unexpected I could not get control of him soon enough. It did not matter how hard I pulled on the reigns, Smokey did not slow down. It seemed like he held the bridle bit between his teeth so he would not feel it when I pulled on the lines. What a smart horse, I thought.
We flew through a stop sign with a blur and crossed a busy highway so fast I did not have time to scream at the car we almost smacked into. Not that screaming would have done any good. Smokey ran straight into the backyard, turning just enough to miss the car sitting in the driveway and the corner of the garage. The horse almost ran into a clothesline, but he managed to stop short. Lizzie fell sideways at the sudden stop and bumped her head against the side of the seat frame. It jerked my head so badly it took me a second to realize what had just happened. Smokey stood quietly, and I realized if he had not stopped short of the clothesline, the damage that would have caused would have been on a whole different level.
As I came to my senses, I had to figure out how to calm down my hysterically-crying little sister. Smokey stood very still and looked around nervously. His hindquarters shook as if he thought I was going to punish him with the buggy whip. I spoke to him gently to calm him down. Smokey had kicked grass up from the lawn, exposing dirt where the horse’s feet had scraped it away.
As Lizzie calmed down, I assessed the situation: because of the size of the yard and the proximity of the house and the clothesline, there was no way I could turn around or back out the buggy. My next option was to unhitch the horse. However, I could not climb down from the buggy and leave Lizzie sitting by herself, and if I took her with me, I could not hold on to Smokey. I closed my eyes and hoped when I opened them again I would wake up in bed and this would only be a bad dream. Unfortunately, when I opened my eyes again the bad situation was as real as ever.
I glanced toward the house and saw a man standing at the back door. He was on the phone. Yikes! He is already calling the police! I thought. He disappeared back into the house. This is not good. He is not even going to see if I need help. During a time like this it would have been nice to have a cell phone to call my parents for help. Do not even think about phones right now, think, think, think of a way to get out. A few minutes later the man left his house and walked over to the buggy.
“I apologize for not coming sooner,” he said. “I was on an important call when I saw this horse and buggy flying into the yard.”
My chest hurt from my heart beating so fast, and my nerves sang with the tension of the situation. “So did you call the police?” I asked in a scared voice, almost choking.
He looked at me over the top of his glasses and smiled. “There is no need to get police involved,” he said. “I can help you.”
“I-I- I am sorry this happened,” I stammered. “Something scared the horse and he made a mad dash down the street.”
“I understand,” he said, still looking at me over the rim of his glasses. “Don’t be sorry, accidents happen all the time and you and your sister are very lucky girls that you didn’t get hit crossing the highway.”
I was relieved he was one of the few city people who did not mind Amish people and their horses. At the time, some people in the town complained about the horse poop on the city streets, and they even tried to pass a city law requiring horses to wear diapers. The Amish elders did not agree with it, so it never happened. As a result, some people were not very friendly with the Amish anymore.
The man held on to Smokey while I unhitched him from the buggy. I could not turn the cart around by myself so we tied Smokey to the clothesline post. With the man’s help, we turned the buggy around and hitched Smokey to it again.
As soon as we got back on the road, Smokey was very skittish; any little noise made him jump. I was scared to drive home, especially since I was still in town. I needed to make one more stop at the grocery store, but I was not about to take the risk of Smokey acting up again. I decided it would be best to turn around and go back home and hope Mem would not be too upset for not bringing home the groceries.
That night I told my family what had happened, but they did not seem to grasp the idea of how scary it had been to fly across a busy highway and mess up a stranger’s back yard.
“I am not very happy about it since it’s so far to town and we are pretty busy here at home,” Mem said while peeling potatoes for supper at the kitchen sink, “but I guess we will go tomorrow again to get groceries.”
Datt stood at the kitchen door smoking his pipe, and the look on his face told me he thought I was a reckless person. Finally, after staring at me for what seemed like ten minutes, he said, “You probably weren’t minding your business or it wouldn’t have happened.”
I wanted to say, Okay whatever you say, Datt, but I kept my mouth shut. There was no use trying to explain why it had happened; whenever he puffed his pipe he always seemed to drift off with the smoke to a faraway land. I had my baby sister with me, so of course I was minding my business. I did not want something to happen to her. I felt so sorry for Lizzie. She had been scared out of her skin, and on the way home I had made her sit close to me to help her feel comfortable again.
§
It was not long before another incident made me begin to wonder if Datt was right about me not paying attention to my surroundings. This incident did not involve traffic or a runaway horse, but rather a mailbox. That time I drove an ugly, stupid, and stubborn horse named Minnie. No one liked to drive Minnie, and on that particular day she walked extra slow. I did not blame her, though—she had twelve miles to get me where I was going.
I had to go to my datt’s twin brother Jacob’s family to help them prepare for the church service that Sunday. The services rotated from one family’s house to the next, and it was tradition the girls help close relatives get ready for church on one day during the week.
Preparing to have a church service at our house usually took a whole week. The house had to be cleaned from top to bottom, not only because we wanted it clean, but also so people would not complain about spotting a speck of dirt, which would have been embarrassing.
After completing the cleaning by Wednesday, the baking started on Thursday. The women began by baking bread to make the bean soup for Sunday’s dinner. It took roughly twelve loaves just for the soup, and another twelve for lunch to eat with jams and jelly. On Friday they made buttermilk cookies and snitz (dried apple) pies, which is standard Amish practice. The cookies and pies were set aside for the little children to snack on during the church service. The adults would eat whatever was left over, after the dishes were washed. The men never helped with the dishes, but yet they got a snack too. I never could understand that concept.
I was not excited about helping my Uncle’s family because I was not enthusiastic about cleaning and baking at someone else’s house when we could not even keep up at home. But I went anyway.
About an hour after I left home, I was driving along the shoulder of a busy highway when it started to rain. When I reached down to grab a cover off the floorboard, Minnie edged farther onto the shoulder of the road, pulling the cart with her. When I looked up again, the front wheel rolled right up to a mailbox shaped like a pig. I quickly jerked the lines to stop the horse, but it was too late: I hit the piggy mailbox with a hard crunch. The lid, shaped as the pig’s nose, fell open, the cover twisted, and the whole mailbox rotated sideways with a loud squeal.
I did not know what to do. All the houses were on the opposite side of the road, so I did not think anyone saw the accident, so I kept on driving. I knew everyone would realize a buggy hit the mailbox because the wagon wheels left fresh tracks in the moist sand leading away from the twisted pig. I did not see any other buggies on the road, so I thought I would have a good chance no one would ever find out who did it. They would especially not suspect it was me.
Once I got to my Uncle Jacob’s house, the whole morning seemed out of whack. I tried to concentrate on helping my cousins clean the wooden floors and windows upstairs, but the image of the mailbox would not leave me alone. What should I do about it? I worried.
While we sat around the table eating lunch, Uncle Jacob answered my question when he asked, out of the blue, if I had hit a mailbox on the big highway. He took a big bite of mashed potatoes and continued, “I just thought it might have been you since you were the last person on the road before me.”
I felt my face turn beet red. I had not expected him to ask me that question. He had been in town that morning and apparently had not been too far behind me as he drove home. Of course, I had to tell him the truth—there was no way to hide my guilt-flushed face.
“Yeah, it was me that hit the mailbox,” I said. I wished I could disappear into a hole, like groundhogs do.
“Be sure to tell your Datt about it because he needs to go talk to the owners and offer to fix it,” he said calmly.
There was no way I could tell my datt about it. After what had happened six month ago with Smokey, he would really question my ability to drive anymore.
“I will let him know,” I said after a long pause.
The rest of my day was just horrible; I rode myself thinking about how I had ruined someone else’s mailbox. Some English people on this side of town did not even like the Amish, and I wondered if the owners of that piggy mailbox could be one of them. Amish-haters had smashed our own mailbox several times in the past. In fact, about a year after we had moved to Missouri, some young guys had driven by our place at night on several occasions and destroyed the mailbox. They had even gone as far as backing into the corner of our house to scare us. I remember lying awake at night scared, wondering if someone could hate the Amish enough to set our house on fire. For just a few seconds, I felt smug that I had the opportunity to smash someone else’s mailbox because of what had happened to ours. I had been taught not to take revenge, but as long as I was only thinking those kinds of thoughts and not telling anyone about them, I thought I would be fine.
I drove home by a different route that evening so I would not have to face the damaged piggy. I did not want to see if the owners had already discovered it. In a way, I was mad with myself, but I tried to find a way to blame the incident on my datt. He should have never bought such a stubborn little horse, especially since no one liked her. Deep down I knew I was the only one to blame, but at the time, it felt better to blame it on someone else.
I decided not to tell my parents what had happened that day because I did not want to face Datt’s judgment. My heart sank a week later when Uncle Jacob and his wife came to visit and catch up on gossip. I feared them telling my parents, so I avoided them in case my presence accidentally reminded them of what had happened. I was almost certain Uncle Jacob would not forget, but every time he came around I would hide so as not to jog his memory. After each visit from his brother, I was afraid Datt would seek me out and ask me about it. After all, I had only made the situation worse by not only hiding the fact I hit the mailbox, but also because I did not confess to him at once. Life went on, however, and I never heard another word about that day, but I carried the burden for a whole year before I grew confident Datt was not ever going to find out.
§
The harvesting in North Dakota ended and I headed back to Texas, where it was almost time for me to start my next chapter in life. I had a feeling the days of working in the fields were over, but I was excited to finally start going to college. Harvesting acres and acres of wheat gave me plenty of time to think about my childhood, especially my teenage years. Being free reminded me that God was always looking out for me whether I knew it or not, and He had guided me to the outside world where He meant for me to be. Thinking about the freedom I now have brought tears to my eyes. I thanked God for the chance to drive a combine, and I compared it to the time when I was just a farm girl at home.
I was sixteen years old and Amish tradition dictated girls should not do fieldwork. But I did not care—I loved it! My two oldest brothers, Jacob and Sammie, did not like farming. So Jacob got a job at an Amish sawmill business making slats for pallets. I traded jobs with Sammie when he complained about having to work in the fields to get ready for spring planting. For my part, I was not content sitting in the shop all day long making baskets. Sammie promised he would try his best to do my job so Mem would not miss my work too much. Basket sales produced our main household income, and the women did most of the weaving. Datt smoked his pipe all day long and expected things to get done without his help. I thought the reason he had so many children was for them to do the work and serve him like a king, as was customary for Amish families.
As Sammie took over my job weaving baskets, I jumped into his job plowing the fields. It did not take me long to learn how to plow with a John Deere one-bottom plow pulled by four big Belgian horses. I do not know how I decided I could handle four horses when I had had problems with just one, but the fact that Datt trusted me with his big babies was shocking. Nevertheless, things started out smoothly and I was able to keep it like that.
I did not have much freedom as an Amish girl, so being in the field all alone, all day long is like being on a vacation. No one bossed me around; in fact, I bossed the horses around. That gave me a great feeling of satisfaction, and suddenly I realized how Rhoda must have felt. I did not have to do much bossing though—the horses knew what they were supposed to do. I looked up at the blue sky and said thank you to the Good Man for giving me the opportunity to be out here all alone, a half mile from home.
As soon as I thought I had the world by the tail, Rhoda decided she wanted her turn at the plow too. Of course, I had to give in and let her try. In our family we had a set age for when we were old enough to do certain work, but everything I did, Rhoda got to do too. She did not have to wait until she was old enough. As soon as I was old enough to bake pies, which was about the only thing I enjoyed doing in the kitchen, Rhoda took it away from me. Now she wanted to start plowing, but there was no way I would let her take that away from me too. Unfortunately, I had no control over it, and since my parents favored her, and whatever they said happened, they agreed Rhoda was old enough to plow.
I did not have to fret too long, though, because Rhoda gave up the first hour in the fields. She could not coax the horses to move forward; no matter what she did to get them to move, they would not listen. I did not watch her that day, but I heard the horses somehow got tangled up in the lines and harness. It made me happy Rhoda was now officially not a farm girl. I got my job back and I plowed for the next ten days, excluding Sunday. I never tired of it. I enjoyed talking to the horses, praising them for messing up Rhoda’s chances for my sake. When the horses rested, I jumped off the plow and walked barefooted on the moist soil. The freshly-turned sod felt soft and cool under my bare feet. My contentment and joy came to an abrupt end when my menstrual cycle arrived and Mem would not let me go out to the fields to plow anymore.
§
I hated when this part of the month came. Amish rules required women to take it easy during their menstrual cycle, stay in the house, and do only light housework. This was especially hard for me during the summer months when there was so much to do outside. During the summer, everyone went barefoot except when that dreaded time of the month hit; I then had to wear shoes for a whole week.
My siblings would ask, “Why are you wearing shoes?” and I could not answer because it was not my place to explain. No one ever talked to me about it, so why should I talk to them about it?
I had no clue what was happening the first time I started bleeding at age eleven. I thought I was deathly ill. I did not feel comfortable enough to tell Mem about it, but after the second day of freaking out, I finally broke down.
“Oh yeah,” she said, “you will start being a ‘gluk’ every month now.” (Gluk means the same as a hen setting on eggs to hatch them).
She showed me some Kotex pads and told me to wear them.
“By the way, tell me every time you are a gluk,” she added, before going back to the sewing machine.
I did not know what to think. Gluk? What a terrible word. Why do I have to tell her? I felt embarrassed, but for what? I had many questions, but asking them was something I could not easily do. My life changed after that, and every time my period started I had to stay home from school for two days, and Mem did not give me any chores requiring too much hard work. I once heard from a friend that if women did not take care of themselves while on their periods, they got very sick and would eventually become handicapped.
After a couple more periods, I started to wonder if all mothers did not inform their daughters about how their bodies would change into bloody monsters for one week every month. It scared me to death when I saw Rhoda wearing shoes one hot summer day. Oh no, I am her big sister. Was I supposed to warn her before she got that far? I do not know. I suspect Rhoda might have known a little about it because she had seen me suffer through it for a year. She did not look worried about it at all. She always had a way of taking everything in stride. Nonetheless, I felt sorry for her.
§
Besides being old enough to work in the fields with horses, and drive into town for shopping, I was also old enough to become a hired maid. Being a teenage girl is like being a slave mother to children of other families. Before girls got married, they had a chance to be hired out to other families needing help with a newborn baby, or needing baby sitters while the parents visited their families and friends out of town.
I worked for an Amish family with eight children. I got paid $1.50 a day, but I had to relinquish the pay to my parents; I was not allowed to keep any money until I turned twenty-one. I had some experience from helping the neighbors, but this time the family lived eighteen miles away, a two-hour drive with horse and buggy. I loved being away from home any chance I had; however, this time I was anything but enthusiastic.
The parents left for Michigan to visit family and friends, and planned to be gone for over two weeks. They took their two-year-old son, but they left me to take care of an eight-month-old baby named Edna and six other children. The oldest attended fifth grade.
Talk about growing up fast! I was only seventeen at the time. I had to pack my sweet girl looks away and put on a tough momma face. I thought I knew everything about raising kids from babysitting my own siblings, but when I tried caring for someone else’s children, my little world got turned on its head.
In addition to watching the kids, I had to cook three meals a day, do the laundry, milk the cows, feed chickens, bottle-feed two small Holstein calves, make applesauce, can pears, pack lunches, and get the kids off to school. The list went on and on. A hired hand did the chores in the mornings so I could stay in the house to make breakfast and help get the rowdy children ready for school. At first, I thought it would be easy to get everything done each day if I made a list. Was I ever so wrong! I could never predict how each day would turn out. Looking back on it, I have to say this experience helped prepare me for the realities of life!
An endless pile of clothes to wash overflowed the washroom the first Monday after the parents left. I thought for sure I was going insane. I wanted to pack up the kids and take them to our house until their parents returned. It would have been better than washing clothes. I had a feeling the mother purposely did not do laundry the week before because she knew the hired maid would do it. A lot people lived at our house, yet never in my life had I seen such a big pile of clothes to wash. I did laundry from eight o’clock in the morning until five o’clock that evening. I lost my voice that day from the stress—my body had a weird way of reacting to it.
Amish have washing machines hooked up to small gasoline engines, but the water must be heated in a big kettle and carried to the washing machine. After the clothes have swirled in the water long enough, they are removed one-by-one and fed through a wringer to squeeze out the excess water.
I had to hang each piece of clothing on clotheslines to dry, and the poor little baby constantly cried that day while I washed clothes. The next day she was sick. She always cried during the night, keeping me up until I was almost in tears. I remembered to throw some regular table salt in her bed to keep her from getting too homesick. As I got a saltshaker and poured salt on the entire mattress, I wondered how on earth anyone would believe it really worked. It was something I used to do for my siblings when my parents left for more than a week. I do not think it helped, but I was desperate to find a solution and was willing to try anything.
If taking care of the household duties was not enough, the family had also asked me to take care of selling the farm’s eggs. I had to wash eggs each day to make sure they were ready to sell if customers stopped by. I did not like it when someone stopped, but it happened several times a day and I had to drop everything to tend to the customers. One day, flour from making bread dough covered me from head to foot when someone knocked on the door. I do not have time for this, I thought impatiently, but I quickly dropped everything and wiped my hands. As I headed to the door, baby Edna started crying. I scooped her up from the dirty floor and answered the door.
“Hello,” I said to an old man patiently waiting on the front steps.
He stared at me for a long second. I began to get nervous as I wondered what was wrong.
Then a smile broke on his face and he reached into his pocket, pulled out a clean handkerchief, and said, “You have something white smeared all over your face.”
“Ya, it is probably white flour,” I replied. “I am trying to make bread and the baby keeps crying so my hands are all over the place.”
He gently wiped my face with the clean-scented handkerchief, then he asked where the parents were.
“They went out of town and I am staying with the kids.”
“My goodness, don’t you need a sitter for yourself?” He looked surprised. “No offense, but you look like a twelve-year-old.”
“With these children there should be more than one babysitter,” I laughed. “I am older than twelve, but I might as well not be.”
“Yes, I feel for you, I have been here many times and I know how it goes around here. If I knew where the eggs are I could save you some energy and get them myself.”
“I can get them for you. It is no problem.”
I scurried down to the basement with the baby still in my arms. I came back with the three-dozen eggs he asked for.
He surprised me by saying, “If you pray a lot, things will go smoother for you.”
I always pray silently, and nothing ever seems to change, I thought to myself rather angrily. Maybe I am doing it wrong. I smiled politely and said, “I will pray more often.”
I watched him walk across the lawn to his rundown Dodge pickup. He had a slight limp and walked bow-legged. I wondered if he told me to pray because he thought Amish do not pray, or if he actually thought I looked pretty rough. I searched for a mirror, and my reflection confirmed the latter: I looked exhausted, and my greenish eyes stared back at me, red and sunken from lack of sleep. A shock of brunette hair hung out from under the bonnet sitting askew on my head, and white flour smeared across my pale cheeks as if I had a run-in at a flourmill. I was the only one in my family who prayed that I knew of, except for Datt, who said a silent prayer before and after each meal.
Each child I babysat had been given a list of chores to do when they got home from school, but after the second day they all decided to ignore them. They stomped through the door when they got home, threw their lunch buckets on the floor in front of the sink, and ran outside to play or fight with each other. The kids fought a lot, making my life a living hell. I tried to keep peace between them, but they would not listen. After all, to them I was nobody. Every time I asked them to play with the baby or carry wood for the cook stove, they jostled to figure out whose turn it was, and that resulted in total chaos. Compared to these rowdy and noisy kids, my siblings were perfect angels, even though they fought sometimes too.
I knew from living in the same community as this family that the children experienced much more physical and emotional abuse than my brothers and sisters ever did. I concluded that, since the parents were not home, the kids wanted a break from their hectic days and I felt a little sorry for them.
During this hectic two weeks I always had dishes to wash, floors to sweep, dirty diapers to change, and messes to clean up. I welcomed a dull moment, but none showed up, not even at night. Each night, while I held the baby and rocked her to sleep, I wondered how in the world I got myself into this. This experience was very far from the life I wanted. I already stood on the verge of a nervous breakdown from my days at home, and I knew if I continued to stay Amish, I would be expected to go work for other families or become a schoolteacher. Taking care of other people’s households and children was a way of preparing for, and learning the values of, being a housewife. Then boom! Before I knew what hit me it would be time to get married and start my own family. Being an Amish woman, there was no time to be just me and enjoy life. I began to realize I wanted no part of it. I wanted to enjoy some freedom before I started my own family, and if I ended up having kids, I wanted to raise them in a different environment. How could parents even think young girls could take on such a responsibility of being both the mother and father of their unruly children?
I looked at the sweet, innocent baby girl sleeping peacefully in my lap and decided I needed to quit thinking all the negative thoughts and go to bed myself. It was already midnight and I was so burned out I could have cried myself to sleep, but I kept my emotions together as best I could. In five hours it would be time to get up and do it all over again.
Not only was babysitting someone else’s children an emotional roller coaster, but the fact I was in turmoil ever since I started dating and going to church singings made life so much more miserable. Teenage life should not be this difficult, I thought as I laid the baby in her crib. Something has got to change.