Visits with the Amish: Impressions of the Plain Life

Chapter 5: How Grace Yoder spent her summer vacation

In an Amish home, every child has a chore or job to do. The Amish believe that children should learn the satisfaction of a job well done at an early age. Industriousness is a virtue and a way of life. The Amish honor every job as important. Washing the clothes equals plowing the field or preaching a sermon. During the school year, scholars might help feed the livestock, bring in the firewood, or mind the younger children after school. By helping out, every child feels needed and wanted. Spring and summer are especially busy times for the Amish. Like country schools a century ago, Amish schools let out a month early so children can help with planting and other farmwork. There’s also time for summer fun—reading, climbing trees, and going on picnics. Sometimes the Yoder family drives their horse and buggy to a nearby lake for a day of food, fishing, and visiting with 43 5 how Grace Yoder spent her summer vacation chapter their aunts, uncles, and cousins. And with so many brothers and sisters around, there’s always someone to share work or play. Grace Yoder doesn’t have time to get bored during summer vacation, even though it’s four months long. Since the beginning of May, when her Amish school finished classes for the year, she has been busy helping her mother and sisters tend the garden, prepare meals, milk cows, mow the lawn, and care for her baby brother, Wayne. “Right when I sat up in bed this morning I went out and helped milk the cows,” says Grace. That was at 6:00 a.m. After breakfast, she started mowing the lawn “and that took most of the forenoon. After dinner, I helped do the dishes and fold the laundry. That’s about it.” Right now it’s 2:30 on a sunny Friday afternoon, and I’m helping her load grass clippings into a bucket to spread under the strawberry plants. Already, by the third of June, the berries hang swollen under the leaves, plump and red. What do the grass clippings do? “Oh, they keep the ground moist,” says Grace. “And help with the weeds.” She’s barefoot, and she says it feels good. I take my shoes off, too. My feet sink into the rich earth, cool and soft. It’s a huge garden , with neat rows of potatoes, peas, onions, radishes, lettuce, tomatoes, beans, and sweet corn stretching for what must be a quarter of an acre. And of course, strawberries. There’s not a weed in sight. Last Tuesday Grace and her older sisters hoed the ground between the plants. Grace speaks politely with a shy, slow smile. She wears a navyblue dress and white apron, with a light aqua scarf, folded like a bonnet, to cover her dark hair. She’ll turn 13 this summer and will enter the eighth grade next year. Her teacher just got married last week. As we carry another bucket of soft grass clippings to the garden, Grace tells me about the wedding. It took place on a Thursday, as do most weddings in her 44 part two how Grace Yoder spent her summer vacation community. Grace visited with many of her friends, since most of the older scholars were there. After church and a ceremony at a neighbor’s home, the bride’s parents served dinner at their house. Mostly Grace and her friends sat around and talked after dinner, but in the evening the young people played volleyball. The mulching finished, we visit the new baby chicks in the tidy wooden chicken house. It’s Grace’s job to feed them each evening before she helps her sister Annie milk three of the family’s cows— Vera, Jolean, and Pam. “Then I come in and just watch the baby or something like that. After dinner we wash the dishes and go to bed.” When she’s not baby-sitting Wayne or helping with chores, Grace likes to read. The whole family takes an hour after the noon meal to lie down and rest. “I like to read about old times, when the Indians were still here, and Westerns, too.” She also climbs trees (“to see how high I can get”) and plays outdoors with her younger brothers or goes fishing with them. Does she miss seeing her friends, now that school is out? “I see them at...