This is a great time of year to be exploring the countryside. Vegetation is thick and lush. Wild flowers are blooming in all their glory in the ditches and along fence lines of every back road we travel. If you haven’t explored the August beauty of the countryside lately, I’d highly recommend taking some time to do it. Walk, run, ride a horse, bicycle, or motorcycle, or drive a car, truck, or tractor. It doesn’t matter what your mode of travel is. Just slow down and enjoy the sights, sounds, and smells of late summer.
Linda and I like to drive slowly around the back roads and through the Amish country not far from where we live. The farm where my mother grew up is on Wang Ridge Road. An Amish family now owns it. Much of that area is now populated with Amish families.
I’m very familiar with all the roads around that area because my mother, grandparents, and great grandparents all lived on farms on Wang Ridge Road. My great grandparents were Christian and Lene Wang.
When I need to slow down from the hectic pace of life that I seem to be caught up in, I head for Amish country and back to a way of life that I remember when I was young. It’s a hard life where people work long hours doing hard, physical work. Many of you grew up on farms and know what I’m talking about. It was a simpler time, far from the high-tech communications world I now work in.
On my way to work one morning, I was coming out of Premier Co-op after buying a coffee to go, when I met an Amish man coming in. We greeted each other and then he said, “You’re Howard Sherpe.” I said I was and asked how he knew me. He said he recognized me from my picture in the paper. He reads my column every week. We had a nice visit. I told him where my mother had grown up. He knew where the farm is located. It was nice to know that people in the Amish community also read “Across the Fence.”
I find it interesting that as I write about the way life was lived when I grew up, I’m also writing about the way the Amish are living life today. This is a case where the past and the present meet and the past is still alive and relevant. It’s not just a memory. I think that’s why I love going for rides through Amish country. I can still relate to the life they’re living.
This past weekend the fields were filled with grain shocks. An old grain binder sat idle at the end of a field where row after row of shocks filled the hilltop oat field. At another farm, a young boy stood on a wagon and held the reins of a team of horses, guiding them between the rows of shocks. Men walked beside the wagon and used pitch forks to throw the grain bundles onto the wagon. Seeing the young boy helping, reminded me of myself when I was about his age.
As we drove past the barn on the farm, another wagon was being unloaded into a threshing machine. The straw was being blown through a door into the haymow of the barn. It would be used as bedding for the cows and horses. The oats was separated from the straw and was being bagged and would go into a grain bin for storage. The only missing component from my memory bank was the big steam engine belching black smoke from the smoke stack. Instead, a stationary gas engine drove the belts attached to the thrashing machine.
I could picture the women scurrying about in the kitchen preparing a hearty meal to feed the hungry thrashing crew. I could practically taste all the delicious food. That was one of the best parts of thrashing. The other event you always remember is when you were allowed to stand on the load and feed the grain bundles into the threshing machine. It was an important job. It was a “man’s” job. You had to learn not to feed the bundles too fast or they would jam up the machine. Then the operator had to stop the machine and unplug it, wasting valuable time. That could quickly get you demoted to helping the bagger, or sent back to the field loading wagons.
You can find lots of memories while driving slowly around the country roads, especially in Amish country. Notice I said driving slowly. It’s important that you slow down and be extra cautious. It would be disastrous if you came roaring over the crest of a hill and slammed into a horse-drawn buggy, or a group of children walking along the side of the road. I’ve seen many vehicles going way to fast and passing a buggy near the crest of a hill because they didn’t want to wait an extra 30 seconds to pass in safety.
A drive through the country is our chance to slow down the pace of life for just a moment and soak up the world around us. The Amish always greet us with a wave and a smile as we pass. We wave back. It’s nice to know that some of them even visit across the fence with me each week.
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