Stephanie     Schwartz

Issue 1, Vol. 1, Winter 2022

The Amish Times

A newsletter to keep you abreast of the progress of The Amish Nurse Series to be released in 2022, pending publication by Satin Romance, an imprint of Melange Books, St. Paul, Minnesota.

Book One is clunking through the process of being edited, formatted, covers designed and soon, published. Thanks to the Pandemic, I have written a series of Amish Romance Novels. The first to hit the book shelves will be Worry Ends Where Faith Begins (the title borrowed from a wealth of Amish wisdom and sayings.) Book #2 is called Time Will Tell, Book #3 is Playing on the Outhouse Roof, and Book #4, the last in the series is The Pearl of Great Price.

Here are the first few chapters of Book #1

 

CHAPTER ONE

 

Phoebe looked out the window as she polished the last lamp chimney on the kitchen table that had been lined up with the others she had gathered from around the house earlier that morning. It was going to be another hot day. The air practically shimmered across the alfalfa fields. Five lamps done, she told herself. Best to trim the lamps in the morning otherwise you might forget and then when you need them in the evening they won’t be clean or filled. She topped off the bottom chamber with kerosene, carefully screwing the cap back on and moved the lamp to the ‘done’ side of the oilcloth-covered table. Another day just like yesterday she told herself breathing out an audible sigh. And the day before that… but that would turn out to be very far from the truth. Today would change her whole life. Forever. And she had no idea what was coming as she dreamily gazed out the window and across the golden fields to her right.

Then noticing a horse and buggy on the county road to her left, she watched absentmindedly as the horse trotted briskly along the shoulder of the road pulling a black buggy behind him, or her, rode on past her family’s farm, past the row of weeping willows and on up the road and out of sight. She wondered wistfully who was in that buggy, certainly not a young man on his way to see her. Oh, how she longed to be courted. If only—but it had not happened yet. Not once.

All her girlfriends had gotten married already. Fine weddings they had too. She was often asked to be one of the attendants, but that is as close as she’d ever been to being in a wedding. Now she spent her days alone with Mamm and Dat. School was out for the summer. Mamm and Dat were great. Mamm was wise and industrious and kind. Dat was funny and eternally telling bad jokes or making up puns that left them all hopelessly groaning. And there was Alice, their beautiful roan horse and the cats and the cows. Her older brothers, Abe and Isaac, had already married and built their own homes on Dat’s land, living close enough to all work together. Her parents had married late; both were in their mid-thirties when they met. They only had the three children, far fewer than many other families in their district. One family had thirteen bobbeli. Phoebe knew that house was never lonely, but the work and the huddlich (mess) were also never ending with such a large family. I won’t have to worry about having that many kinner at the rate I’m going, she thought to herself.

            Turning away from the window she finished the lamps and picking up two, headed for the upstairs bedrooms. As she set each lamp on a bedstand, she shut the window and pulled closed the curtains. It’s best to shut the cool night air in the house so we don’t bake all day, she reasoned. Without air conditioning or electric fans, a house could get mighty hot on a summer day in the Midwest. Old Order Amish homes don’t have electricity, so you make do with what you have.

 

CHAPTER TWO

 

Grossmammi’s favorite saying was, “Be genuine. Be kind, and thoughtful. But most of all, be thankful.” Phoebe was thankful. She loved her home, her family, her community and her church and knew they had been very blessed indeed. They worked hard, they prayed hard and then left the rest to God. A simple life, yes, but lonely sometimes, too.

She had prayed earnestly for years, seven to be exact, since her sixteenth birthday that God would find a husband for her. When nothing turned up after seven years, (plus three months and eight days, but then who was keeping track anyway?) she had a good think about this husband business and went to ask her grandmother for advice. Grossmammi always had advice. Gut advice, too.

            “Gott will find you a husband in exactly the right time, my dear. You don’t want to rush Him. Being desperate and taking someone you don’t love could make your life a living hell,” Mammi nodded knowingly. “Gott might think being single is best for some, too, but then you will find joy in other ways. We don’t need to fret. ‘Worry ends where faith begins,’ they say.”

            Phoebe was twenty-three, not exactly an old maud, but she felt like that most days. She was also taller than a lot of the girls she knew. The tiny, skinny ones always get picked first she reminded herself. Thinking back to what Grossmammi said about not fretting, she took herself in hand and turned back to her chores. Her older brothers—they still called them ‘the boys’—took over the dairy farm when they married, so she no longer had to milk cows. Good riddance! She would never marry a cow farmer she’d promised herself.

            Phoebe had taught school for three years already and looked forward to returning to the cozy one-room schoolhouse in the fall if the school board offered to renew her contract. She loved teaching school. It was like having twenty children of her very own for seven hours every day, little ones, big ones, all shapes and sizes, even ztzvilling (twins.) Since the one-room schoolhouse was less than two miles from her home she usually hitched Alice to the smaller open trap buggy and kept her in the little stable by the school during the day, or if the weather was particularly nice she walked to school. Some of the students’ dats drove their buggies by her place on their way as they took their kinner to school each morning and she sometimes waved down a ride with them on the days her dat needed the carriage to go to town.

            Phoebe was thinking about what needed to be done to get the school ready for the new year when her mamm called her to breakfast. She sniffed the air as she came down the stairs. Mmmm, cinnamon rolls. That’s a treat, she told herself. Huh, smells like fresh cut hay, too. Abe or Isaac must be out there already. I bet it’s plenty hot. Dat would be in any moment from his chores in the barn.

Phoebe wasn’t skinny, but not really fat either, just pleasantly plump Mamm said. Her hair was an auburn brown, almost as brown as Alice, thick and quite wavy. Her eyes were a grayish blue. She liked wearing blue dresses that showed off her eyes. She wasn’t pretty like she wished, not like the fair damsels she admired in the picture books and Bibles she had read as a child. She wasn’t homely. Just Plain. Like Mamm.

            Mamm and Dat were both in their 60s now but they were in gut health and still quite industrious. Mamm managed the garden, planting vegetable and flower seeds the moment Dat’s tiller came out of the ground in early May. She had little starter plants growing from seeds indoors as early as February. The egg cartons holding all the tiny seedlings threatened to overtake the house there were so many lined up along the living room and kitchen base boards where they wouldn’t get stepped on. The seed catalogs started showing up at the house every August, even before the harvest had been brought in. Mamm still planted a huge garden even though the boys weren’t eating with them every day, often sending vegetables home, saying she knew their wives were too busy with new bobbeli to have big gardens.

            In the fall, Mamm would have the kitchen humming from dawn to dusk with canning or drying the garden’s bounty, making enough for the boys’ families too. She loved making pickles—sweet and sour pickles, garlic dills, sweet bread-’n-butter pickles, even sweeter little Gherkins; and jams and chow-chow, pears, fruit leather, apple butter, and pumpkin pie and mince pie fillings, spicy stewed tomatoes. She dried her own herbs, too. Oregano for tomato sauce, fennel for homemade sausage, chives for salads, sage for chicken dishes, parsley for soups come winter, and huge elephant garlic for everything else, which was braided and hung in the kitchen.

            Phoebe loved the fall best. She loved working alongside Mamm in the kitchen as the rows of colorful jars grew in the root cellar. Each evening they would lead Dat downstairs to admire all the jars they had put up that day. He warned Mamm not to get too brot (proud) of it all. Mamm would answer that it was just such satisfying work to put food by for the coming year. Last year after studying all the colorful jars--plums next to pickles, jellies next to mustard

beans--he said, “You know, it might be a whole lot less work and fuss if I just bought you some colored sand to fill all those jars with,” which sent them all into gales of laughter.

 

CHAPTER THREE

 

            The bishops from the neighboring six districts didn’t usually meet unless there was an extremely dire situation they needed to address. Settling themselves around the table at Bishop Lehman’s house, his wife Rosanne set plates of pie and mugs of coffee on the table before each elder as quietly as she could so as not to distract from the meeting. Then the bishops bowed their heads for the silent grace. After a moment Bishop Lehman said aloud, “Vella essa,” (let’s eat) and they dug into the pie.

            The kitchen was cool; it was still early. Rosanne had already closed up the house but it was light enough even with the blue curtains shut not to need to ignite the mantle lamp hanging above the table where the bishops sat. Bishop Lehman waited until his wife left the kitchen to attend to her chores before he began, smoothing out a tiny wrinkle in the gingham tablecloth before him with his finger while he waited.

            Then he began. “We have a problem here that we need to discuss. You know Andrew Gingerich died last week in the hospital. His doctor wouldn’t let us bring him home in his final days, saying we didn’t have anyone to care for him properly. The doctor said he could find a private nurse to come ’round every day and give him his injections, but that might not cover his pain enough and asked if we would be able to hire nurses ’round the clock?”

            The bishops all nodded, their brows deeply furrowed with concern, their mouths full of cherry pie.

            “And then we have the problem of all these C-sections. I don’t know why it seems that’s all they do now. Are they really necessary? They are a huge expense besides it takes longer for mamms to recover. And then they are at risk of having an automatic C-section with their next bobbel.

            “I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and praying for wisdom and some direction. I’ve called you all here to consider what I have come up with. I just don’t know any other way.”

            The bishops all put down their forks, and looked at Bishop Lehman, eager to hear what he had to say.

“Well, now then, just hear me out before you say anything. I know this is new. It has never been done before, but desperate times call for desperate measures.” He took a deep breath and continued. “I know many of our other Plain neighbors have the same problems in their settlements and colonies. I’ve heard the Hutterites have come up with a pretty gut solution. Each colony that agrees has sent one of their older girls to junior college to get their practical nurse license. It’s a two-year course. Then they are able to go to the hospitals with their fraus when they go in to have bobbeli. Maybe doctors won’t be as free to do unnecessary surgeries with one our own there. As nurses they can care for old or dying people at home too. It would save us an awful lot of money which would help since we don’t use health insurance. They might also be able to tell mothers when they don’t need to run to the doctor for every little thing, or tell us when we should go in, like when Luke’s boy got bit by their hog and he got that awful-bad infection so quick.”

            Bishop Byler spoke next. It was obvious that he was quite agitated by now. “It is unprecedented! Those girls would be exposed to every temptation out there. I say NO WAY!”

            “But it could be a really gut thing,” Bishop Lapp reasoned. “We would have to find a mature girl to go, not someone who could be easily swayed by everything she sees. But our girls only have an eighth-grade education. Would they still let them in?”

            “They’d have to pass the entrance exam but we can see how that goes,” Bishop Lehman answered.

            The bishops spoke in turn until each had expressed all the pros and cons of such a radical step. Only bishops could suggest anything not covered by the rules in the Ordnung.

            “We don’t have to decide today,” Bishop Lehman added. “But I’ve looked into the school and the girl would need to register soon before school starts.”

            “Is anyone still opposed?” Bishop Lehman asked, looking back and forth.

            No one spoke.

            “Are we agreed then to explore this avenue?” he went on.

            Everyone nodded their agreement, then looked at Bishop Byler, who finally nodded too.

            “Then it is settled. But, um, now then,” Bishop Lehman hesitated, “who would we ask? We don’t want a mamm who might not be able to stay for the whole course. We don’t want someone who hasn’t joined church yet either and then could leave and go Englische. We want someone who is committed to our life and would agree to give it her all. Any suggestions?” he asked as the bishops began scratching their beards as they thought. They were silent for a long while as they pondered. Bishop Lehman went back to rubbing invisible wrinkles out of the checkered tablecloth by his plate.

            Finally one bishop spoke up. “Maybe Kathi Mast?”

            Another bishop disagreed. “I don’t know if she could handle the studying. She wasn’t great in school, even with the eighth grade at the end.”

            Bishop Bontrager waved his hand. “What about Elizabeth Miller? She’s already twenty-five and still single.”

            “No, she wouldn’t go. She’s afraid of her own shadow. Her dat couldn’t even convince her to be at the vegetable stand at the road last weekend,” another bishop argued.

            They continued to think while they stared at their pie plates, now empty, and slowly gathered up any tiny crumbs there with a wet finger.

            “I know,” Bishop Yoder finally piped up enthusiastically. “Phoebe Schwartz! She’s level-headed enough and a hard worker, but then I’d hate to lose such a gut teacher. She’s smart, well-liked and able to handle even the oldest kinner. But I can’t think of anyone else more qualified.”

            Everyone agreed, obviously very relieved.

            “It’s unanimous then, is it?” Bishop Lehman asked.

            Yes, it was unanimous they all nodded.

            “I go by their farm on my way home,” he added.

            “So do I,” Bishop Yoder offered.

            “Well, now then, let’s go together and ask her if she would be willing,” Bishop Lehman concluded. They were still a bit unsure how this ferhoodled (new-fangled) idea would go over in the districts. Some of the older people might object, but then there wasn’t too much they could do if the bishops had agreed. The hope was it wouldn’t divide the settlements but that everyone would see the necessity and support the idea.               

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