An Amish Poetess
One of my Amish friends (I’ll call her Violet) is a homeschooling mother of seven. I asked her once why she home-schooled when she had so much work to do and had the option of sending her children down the road to an excellent one-room Amish school. “For the opportunity to spend more time with my children,” she said. She didn’t elaborate, but the tone in her voice said, “Such a silly question. Why else would I home-school except for the sheer joy of it.” At the time, we had just driven to a private home where a local family makes a modest living selling Amish-friendly home-schooling materials out of a small garage. There is no sign indicating that this building is housing anything more than a buggy or workshop–and yet it appeared to be a flourishing business. There were several customers. I followed along behind Violet while she and two of her daughters selected the materials they needed for the coming year. The girls were as excited about their new schoolbooks as Englisch girls their age would be over a new I-pod. Later, we stopped and did some shopping at a scratch-n-dent Amish grocery store made up of soon-to-go-out-of-date […]