Time passing as men pass who never will come back again…
And leaving us…with only this – Knowing that this earth,
this time, this life are stranger than a dream…

—Thomas Wolfe
_______________

The email popped in one day last summer, sometime in early July. From a reader. Which was not at all unusual, and still isn’t. I’ve heard from people from a lot of different places. Mostly from this country, of course. But also from far places like China, Japan, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Australia, Mexico, and several European countries. From people who downloaded my book on the internet, and wrote to tell me about it. This message was a little different, though. It was a bit longer than most. And, more startlingly, it was from a professor in Germany.

Her name was Dr. Sabrina Völz, and she taught at Leuphana Universität in Lüneburg, way up north. She had read the book and was touched by my story, she wrote. And she was intrigued by the literary aspect of it. She told me a bit about herself. She teaches English and North American Studies, teaching those who will teach English. And she went on. In her academic research, she focused on ethnic literature and culture in North America, and the American short story.

Wow, I thought. Now that’s a small world, right there. A professor in Germany read my book. A professor. And she wrote to tell me. How cool is that? She wasn’t done there, though. The email went on.

She’d like to interview me, she wrote, if I’d be willing. Either by email or in person. She was traveling to New York City in August with her husband and children. Would it be possible to meet to talk, if she came to Lancaster County? She didn’t want to infringe, but she really would like to use the interview to teach a seminar there at the University. And maybe write an article to be published, too. What did I think? Would it be possible to meet?

Well, yeah, I thought. Sure it’s possible. It’s remarkable, too. An email from a professor in Germany who had read my book. And she wanted to interview me. Of course I would. I get two or three interview requests a month, mostly from students writing research papers. From grade school to post-graduate level. Mostly the interviews are done by email, although once in a while I’ll give someone half an hour of my time of an evening on the phone. I have never turned anyone down. I’m not out there looking to get interviewed but if you have a legitimate reason to ask, I’m always honored. And I’m not just saying that. I really am. But Dr. Völz wasn’t quite done, yet. The email went on.

I read on your blog where you travel some to give book talks, she wrote. It would be great if you’d consider coming to Germany. I could easily get you booked at my University and a few others in the surrounding area. I don’t know if you’ll travel that far, though. And I thought to myself. Germany? Travel to Germany? Fat chance I’ll ever do that. It would be wild, though. But I’m sure the cost would be way out there prohibitive. Plus, I’d have to take time off work. And that’s what I told her in my response. Sure, I’ll talk to you when you’re traveling through. I’d be honored. I have some Amish friends I could introduce you to, if they’re home that day, that is. I’ll find out. But traveling over to talk at your University? That’s a little far-fetched. I’m pretty happy right here where I am.

We emailed back and forth a few more times. From the start, she insisted that I call her Sabrina, not Dr. Völz, as I had addressed the first message. OK, if you insist, I said. I’m always hesitant to do that, to not recognize a degree someone has worked hard for. And one Saturday afternoon in late August, we met at The Back Page, a nice little pub in Leola. I got there first and waited by my truck. And soon enough, a little mini van pulled in and parked. A tall man unwound himself from the driver’s side. Sabrina got out of the passenger’s side and walked up to me, smiling. We shook hands and she introduced me to her husband, Hans-Jürgen and their two school-aged children, Maximilian and Emily. After chatting a few minutes and posing for a pic, Sabrina and I walked into the pub while her husband and children left to cruise the area for an hour or so and see some sights.

With Dr. Sabrina Völz.

We got along quite well from the first moment. Just chatted along. She asked about the book, how it came to be. And I told her. My blog brought it to me. After a bit, she set up her little recorder on the table, and off we went, for the official interview. Which used to make me a little skittish, early on, having a recorder sitting there latching onto your every word. But it doesn’t anymore. You have to relax and be yourself. Speak what you know, what you believe, what’s in your heart. Sure, you might stumble and say something that doesn’t come out right. But if you do, you can correct yourself. That’ll be recorded too, I figure.

In about an hour, we were done. Sabrina handed me her hard copy of the book and I signed it. She had a real hard copy, not the electronic version. I was surprised and pleased, not that there’s anything wrong with any version. But still, a real book is a real book, I’ve always felt. Something that you can take and hold in your hands. I like that. And we chatted again for a few minutes.

“You know,” she said. “I wasn’t kidding when I asked if you would come to speak at the University. I think I could get the funding to bring you over. But you didn’t seem that interested. Would you consider it, if I can get you over there?”

And I laughed. Look, I said. I’m very content where I am. But if you get funding for the trip, of course I would come. I’d be stupid not to. I just would never expect such a thing. I mean, what chance is there of that happening? But I’ll come. Oh, yeah, I’ll come. I’ve never been to Europe. Never. If you get it done, get me over there to talk about my book at a few Universities, I could even boast that I’m an international lecturer. That’s a joke, that last thing I said, there.

She laughed, too. “You might be surprised,” she said. “I’ve done it before, brought an author over to speak. And your story is unique enough that I think it might work. I’m going to try when I get back home. I’ll start filling out the applications. I actually think there’s a pretty good chance. I’ll keep you updated.”

That’s great, I said. I really appreciate your confidence, and that you think my book is worth all that effort. But I won’t look for anything until I see it coming.

Her family had returned, and they all followed me the few miles to the home of my Amish friends. I had asked them, a few weeks before. Would you like to meet some folks from Germany? They’ll be here, and I know they’d sure love to meet some real Amish people. I’d love to bring them over. And my friends said what they usually say to my off-the-wall requests. Bring them on. We’ll make coffee.

We arrived, and were genuinely welcomed, as I knew we’d be. My friends invited us into their home, and we sat around the kitchen table, talking and drinking coffee and lemonade and eating pretzels and cheese and cookies. I had planned on staying only a few minutes, but we all got along so well that before we knew it, more than an hour had passed. Sabrina and her family told us what it was like, to live in northern Germany. The customs, how things went, the cost of a house. And my friends told them how it was to live as Amish in Lancaster County. You can’t get all that much said in a little over an hour. But we made the most of the time we had. And we all enjoyed the company of each other.

The Völz family at the table of my Amish friends.
Sabrina is signing the guest book.

They left then, heading out to their next stop. And I thought back to that day more than a few times, how cool it was, to have someone like Sabrina and her family show up to meet me and my friends. And sure enough, a week or three later, here comes another email.

Thanks for your hospitality, she wrote. We all enjoyed meeting your friends very much. And thanks for interviewing with me. Now, here’s the info I’ll need to fill out that application. Full name, address, and so forth. I sent her what she asked for. And life just went on, as it does. I stayed busy living it.

A week or two later, she emailed that she had submitted the application. Keep your fingers crossed. I’m hopeful, she wrote. Yes, yes, I wrote back. It would be hugely exciting, but don’t worry if it doesn’t work out. I expect nothing. And there’s where things rested for a while.

And then, right at two months ago in early January, here comes another email. A very happy one. She got the funding, Sabrina wrote. It came through. The trip was on. All expenses paid. A place to stay. And three book talks at three different places, plus a stipend for each talk, yet. I had half believed her earlier, when she told me she had a good shot at getting it through. But still, there’s nothing like seeing it right in front of you on your computer screen.

And I just sat there at my desk at work and stared at her message. She had really done it. I was going to Germany. I have never been to Europe. Never. Which probably makes me a hick to some people. But it was never that high on my bucket list. Sure, I always figured it would all work out someday, somehow, that I’d get there. But I’d never fretted much about it, exactly how it would happen. It was just one of those things you know. And now the book was taking me. It took a bit, to absorb the enormity of all that.

I never bother my friends in the publishing world much. Never have, never will. Those people live in a world so far removed from mine that sometimes I think it’s another planet (a good planet, just not the one I’m on). But that day, I wrote a little note and sent it to my agent and a couple of my good friends at Tyndale. Hey, I want to share this joy with you. Look what’s happening. The book’s taking me to Germany. I’m speaking at a University. In Germany. I’ve never even been to Europe. Now the book’s taking me. How wild is that? And they all wrote back. It’s quite wild indeed. Congratulations.

I had another thing on my mind, though, and wrote back to Sabrina. Thanks very much. This is unbelievable. Now, let me ask this. Would it be possible to get my return ticket a week later than my stay in Germany? I’d like to travel on over to Switzerland on my own, to check out the areas my Anabaptist ancestors came from. Sabrina answered immediately. No, that should not be a problem.

And we worked out the schedule. I’ll be leaving in early May, returning in mid May. The first week, I will be with Sabrina and her family and colleagues. I’ll be speaking at the University and a few other locations. I think I’m speaking in a couple of classes Sabrina teaches. And maybe at a high school. I’m not exactly sure of the schedule at this point. Whatever is lined up for me will be fine. And right now, I’m not nervous about any of it, because I haven’t thought about it much. I will, though, as the time gets closer. Things like, how do you address a group whose primary language is not English? I think most people at the University speak and understand English. Should I speak slower? And I wonder if anyone over there would understand my PA Dutch.

The next weekend, I’ll take the train to Switzerland. I haven’t really figured out where all I’ll be going, yet. Definitely I want to see some sites that are historically significant to the Amish and Mennonites, like where Felix Manz was drowned. And maybe some castles with dudgeons. I want to check it all out, so see the spots where all that terrifying stuff happened that I saw and read in the Martyr’s Mirror as a child. I want to walk where my forefathers walked, hundreds of years ago. And I want to see the ground on which they stood when the state condemned and murdered them.

I’ve been around long enough to know that nothing happens until it happens. Despite all the best laid plans, tomorrow is promised no one. I always try to keep in mind, as something big like this approaches, that something could go wrong. It just could. Mom could leave us the day I’m scheduled to fly over. It could be anything. But last week, Sabrina sent my eTicket, so we’re that far along. That’s when I figured it’s safe to write the story here on my blog. The story of how it all came down so far.

And yeah, I’m flying. Got no other option. The TSA goons are gonna get their paws on me. I’ll have to grit my teeth and take it. When it comes to flying, I’ve always had an exception for funerals, emergencies, or something really big. I figure this is something really big.

I still haven’t fully absorbed it all, that this trip is really happening. I won’t, until the day gets a lot closer. A week out, I’ll start freaking for real. This is uncharted terrain for me, a huge adventure. And yes, it is just flat out wild, the whole thing. Another wild strange stop on a wild and strange and beautiful road.

And I look at it all and wonder. What were the chances that a person in Germany would pick up my book and read it, a person like Dr. Sabrina Völz, who had the clout and the connections to do what she did to get me over there? I’d say they were extremely remote, if you look at random chance alone. Maybe it was more than that. I don’t know.

I am proud of the book, proud of the accomplishment of actually getting it written and having it published. I’m proud of all it has been and all the good things that have flowed from it. But still, I am who I am. A guy just walking along, trying to describe as best I can the world around me and the things I have seen and lived. And all I know is that I walk forward into this journey as I’ve tried to walk, these past few years. With joy and with thanksgiving, but mostly with a grateful heart. That’s the one thing that’s kept my head half straight, this last while. Simple gratitude to God for the host of astonishing blessings He has poured into my life. And continues to.

One of these days, this little ride that is the book will end. I’ll look around, a bit startled, probably. Where am I? What just happened? I might have to pinch myself to make sure it wasn’t all one long, beautiful dream. And then I’ll get off and go right back to being who I was before. Just with a little more world experience.

It’s been quite a ride. Maybe someday I’ll have to do it all over again.

**********************************************************

There’s a little issue I’ve been wanting to throw out there for a while, but just never got done. I mentioned a few blogs back that the half-millionth hit was coming right up. It came a little over a week later. A shining and proud moment. I snapped a pic of the screen with the number. 500,000 even. I never wrote for the numbers, but that was a very cool milestone for me.

Anyway, in the past couple of years, I have gotten a half dozen or so random emails from advertising companies. Hey, they say. We notice you’re getting some nice traffic on your blog. Would you consider running some ads? We’d love to sign you up. I always ignored those messages. It just didn’t seem important.

But lately, some of my geeky friends have told me the same thing. Why not run some banner ads, there on the left side of the screen? Or both sides? It’s completely empty space. People are used to seeing ads when they read online. You could make a few bucks. And I told them. I don’t know. It’s never been important to me. All I want is a place to write my stuff. I suppose it’s not a big deal, one way or the other. But I still couldn’t quite bring myself to give anyone the go-ahead.

It all boils down to this, money wise. I suppose I’d earn a few dollars a month. Enough, maybe, for food and beer and drinks for my garage party every summer. Those are very important things. But they won’t break the bank, either way. Nice money to have. Won’t miss it much if I don’t.

And I thought, I’ll just ask my readers. This is where I’m writing for now, and will be for a while. Would you mind if I ran ads along the left side of the blog? Or both sides? Yes? No? Why? Why not? Give me some feedback. I’m not saying I’ll keep a tally of votes and go with that, or anything. But I’ll sure take into consideration what you have to say.

The sun flames red and bloody as it sets, there are old
red glintings on the battered pails, the great barn gets
the ancient light as the boy slops homeward with warm
foaming milk…

—Thomas Wolfe
_______________

It flashed through the Facebook world earlier this week. Another Amish study of some sort. Those things seem to pop up like magic, right along. And it might even have been an older study, because stuff like that gets recycled on Facebook all the time. I never bothered to check the date. And, yeah, I linked it and threw it out there to my world. The report was all breathless and excited. Concluding what should be common sense, really. Amish children are amazingly resistant to allergies, it proclaimed. A way lower percentage of them are afflicted than are children in mainstream society.

Oh my, I thought. What a surprise. Wonder what kind of genius came up with that. And how could it even be, such a thing? Those people are so primitive. Why would their children be healthier than mainstream children, at least when it comes to allergies? And why don’t their children get sick as much?

I knew the reason before I even read the story. The reason Amish children as a group are resistant to allergies and such is simple. One word. Dirt. They grow up in it. They play in it, they work in it. And some of it, no doubt, finds its way through the mouth into the digestive system, too, at times. It doesn’t seem to faze them one bit. There are exceptions, as always, of course. There are sickly Amish children. But I’m talking as a group. With all that exposure to whatever germs and other evils lurking about, those children develop a natural resistance. Tough, is what they are. And in an increasingly urban world, such a thing is now considered a wonder. An aberration, not the norm.

And nah, this is not an indictment of urbanization, or “sprawl,” as the statists love to call it (they won the language war with that one). Not a call to return to the land. Such things always sound nice and flowery, and logical almost, in theory. But mostly it’s just fluffy words, words that ignore the market and the division of labor. The simple fact is, people have to live somewhere, and not everyone can grow up on a farm. It’s not possible, or desirable, even. The best use for land, any land, is whatever the truly free market decides, be it houses or factories or shopping centers (yep, including Wal Marts) or crop fields. People have to live somewhere and they have to work somewhere, and they can’t all be on the farm.

I looked at the stock photo accompanying the article. A line of young Amish kids standing there, from toddlers to probably twelve years old. Plainly Lancaster County children. And I thought to myself, they look awfully clean. Slicked up. Compared to the world I grew up in, they were.

And I think back to how it was. I don’t think very many children on this Continent today, Amish or otherwise, see and live the things I saw and lived. If they did, the Children-and-Youth folks would have a heart attack. And a field day, with many arrests and interventions and tearing families apart, the kinds of things they do. All soothed over with sanctimonious press releases about abused children being rescued from unacceptable conditions. Such conditions, of course, always defined by them.

I grew up on the farm and I grew up dirty. Gloriously grimy. I’m not talking Pigpen in the Peanuts comic strip filthy, walking around with clouds of dust hovering like a tiny sandstorm. It wasn’t anything like that. But we were grimy. Still, some basic rules of sanitation applied. We were taught to always wash our faces and hands before coming to the table to eat. And we always had to wash our feet at bedtime, after running around barefoot all day in summer. Although sometimes our sisters forgot to check and we managed to slip through without endurng that little ordeal.

By today’s standards, well, if we stood before the world now as we were back then, we’d probably shock a lot of English people. And maybe some Amish people, too. I’m thinking we couldn’t have smelled that great, either. But we didn’t know any better. We took a bath once a week. I detested having my hair washed, that was done probably every couple of weeks or so. My curls got so tangled up that when my sisters cornered me of a Sunday morning and tried to comb my hair for church, I cried and cried and begged them to stop.

It was a different time, obviously. Even a different age, maybe. I don’t know. We were who we were, in that time and place. In Aylmer, as Amish children. The community was the world we knew. The farm was our home within that world. And I have a host of fond memories of the journey through my childhood.

I remember how it felt, as the bitter cold of winter receded and spring approached. The seething stormy days of March, as the snow banks settled into the earth and the ice slowly melted in the pond. Great flocks of geese and ducks swept northward in gigantic Vs. Then April, and rain. The warmth crept in, slowly, pushing back the memories of winter. To us, there was always a looming magical day. Sometime in May, usually, when Mom checked the thermometer. If it read around 70 degrees outside, she issued a very important proclamation. The children may go outside barefoot. We savored the delicious joy of the rush of that first moment, of running barefoot through the grass for the first time in spring. I can still feel it. And, gloriously barefoot, we ran everywhere, through the fields, through mud and manure and over rocks and gravel. And within weeks, the bare soles of our feet were as tough as the shoe leather they had replaced.

I give the adults in that world a lot of credit. They pretty much allowed us to run free. Not that we weren’t told what was what. The dangers to stay away from. We were told. Sternly admonished about a lot of things. And spanked, if we got caught not obeying. My sister Maggie, the most protective soul in the family, always imagined the very worst scenario that could possibly happen. She kept tabs on us, as much as possible, and because of her, we probably got into a bit less trouble than we would have otherwise.

And we ran as I wish all children would be allowed to run, into a world of real adventure. The cow paths winding through the pasture fields were our highways. The gloomy shadows of the south woods were our magical realms. The pond was our great sea. And the dry creek behind the barn was our raging river after a hard rain. We snuck up on groundhogs in the fields. Shot at sparrows with homemade slingshots and BB guns, and after age 12, with rifles.

Stephen, Titus and I built many a raft from old fence posts, cobbled together with rusty nails. And we poled our way across the pond, again and again, right over the deepest places. With no such thing as a life jacket. We didn’t even know what a life jacket was. We fished the pond and the gravel pits a half mile east. We went swimming with our friends. We salvaged old lumber and constructed a dam across the dry creek. It held up well, and years later we could still see remnants of it along the banks on each side.

It wasn’t all play, though. Far from it. We learned to work, and work hard, while very young. And I look back and marvel sometimes. It’s a wonder, if not a miracle, that we didn’t get seriously hurt somewhere along the way, or even killed. Not because the Amish are particularly careless or anything, but because farming is one of the most dangerous occupations in the world. You always hear about firefighters and cops, the dangers they face. Not saying they don’t. But that hand’s way overplayed, in my opinion. Farming is more dangerous.

Farms have animals. Big animals. And Amish farms have big horses instead of tractors. By the time I was nine or ten years old, it wasn’t at all unusual for me to take a team to a field by myself, hitch the horses to a disc harrow, and till the earth. I thought nothing of it. Our horses were generally a pretty shabby lot, but the teams I drove at that age were calm and tame. I don’t remember that I particularly liked or disliked horses at the time. It was just all I knew. There were no other options. No other possibilities.

We helped Mom in her large garden just west of the yard west of the house. At planting time, she called us to come help plant the seeds. She cut up potato chunks that we dropped in long shallow trenches, then covered with a hoe. One of my very earliest memories was in that garden, about mid morning one day. I was out there with my Mom and sisters, too small to work, just running about underfoot. Dark clouds roiled in the west as a thunderstorm approached. I heard the rumbles and thought it sounded like a steel-wheeled horse drawn farm wagon, the kind we had on the farm, bumping down the road. I hear a wagon coming, I told Mom. “No, no,” she said, smiling. “That’s not a wagon. That’s thunder, coming from those clouds. It’s going to rain. We have to go inside soon.” And that was my introduction to what approaching thunder sounds like.

At milking time, we trudged to the far pastures and herded home the cows. Milked by hand, and strained the milk into aluminum cans sitting in the concrete water tank in the milk house. And yeah, we drank that raw milk, too. You bet we did. We knew nothing else. And it’s one of the greatest outrages of our time, a symptom of far deeper issues, what the state is doing to Amish farmers who insist on providing raw milk for the market. They are prosecuted worse than real hardened criminals. Because of absolutely arbitrary and senseless state decrees, backed by the state’s blatantly criminal actions. One of these days, I will go off and write a blog about all that. And some readers wonder why I so deeply detest the state as an entity of pure evil. Raw milk is only one of the myriad reasons why.

We harvested loose hay from the fields, an ancient contraption of a hayloader hooked behind the wagon. Not many people alive today have ever seen a hayloader work. I remember trucks and cars slowing and even stopping along the road, the drivers gaping at this odd sight from another age. Often, my job was to drive the team as one of my brothers stacked the loose hay that came pouring on. And once, I hung on helplessly as a wild young team kind of took control and plunged away from the windrowed hay. The horses could feel a child’s hand, and decided to step out a bit. My brother Joseph was working at the back of the wagon, guiding and stacking the loose hay. As the team lunged forward, the hayloader lunged along with it. Poor Joseph was almost buried as great waves of hay suddenly cascaded onto the wagon from above.

“What’s going on?” he shouted. I can’t hold the horses, I hollered back.

He stabbed his fork into the hay and dropped down over the front of the one man rack. Strode in about two steps to the front of the wagon, where I was hanging helplessly on to the reins, pulling straight back with all my might. Joseph grabbed the reins from my locked-in fingers. He seesawed the reins back and forth rather savagely, speaking firmly to the team. The horses, sensing and feeling a real adult’s hands, instantly became docile. Joseph guided them back onto the hay row and stopped the team. Handed me the reins again. Then he instructed me, and I never forgot.

“When the horses are pulling at the bit like that, you can’t just hang on and pull straight back,” he said. “They’re way bigger and stronger than you. You have to yank the reins sideways, back and forth, to let them know you’re in control.” Oh, OK, I said, timidly taking the reins from him. And back we went, trundling down the hay row. His advice seemed to work very well.

It’s a dangerous place, the farm. And I remember the story that was always told in hushed tones, a story of how I almost lost an older brother. Not that I would ever have known, because it happened when I was an infant.

It was winter, and Dad had cut blocks of ice from the pond on the deep end. Maybe the neighbors came and helped, as they did years later in my memory. But that day, at dusk, there were still blocks of ice in the water. My sister Maggie was seventeen. And my brother Joseph was fifteen. The two of them were out on the pond just as darkness came creeping in, loading one more sleigh with ice to take to the icehouse. I’m not sure what Dad was thinking, sending his children out there unsupervised like that. But there they were.

Joseph was just a skinny kid. He leaned over with the ice tongs to pull the blocks from the water. Maggie held onto him as he did it, so he wouldn’t fall in. And things rolled right along. Joseph stepped onto a row of blocks that had not broken loose. He leaned over and stabled the tongs into a loose block in the water. And the blocks he was standing on gave way. He plunged straight down into the icy darkness.

Maggie screamed for help. Joseph slipped below the surface and came back up. Clawed at the solid ice Maggie was standing on. And slipped back in and under again. Slipped sideways, almost under the frozen solid ice. And Maggie moved without thinking. She knelt and reached down and grabbed her brother by the collar with one hand. And with that one hand and arm, she literally yanked him to the surface and safety. There’s no way she could have had the natural strength to do that. Not by a long shot. No way. But she did it.

Joseph was soaked and freezing. The two of them ran into the house, and told the others what had happened. And just that close, I might have had an older brother I never knew, except for his name. And just that close, his own children were never born.

And, of course, the farm was dangerous in many lesser ways. Not a summer went by that most of us children didn’t step onto a nail at least once outside somewhere, protruding from junk lumber. One day, we were hauling trash to be burned on the fire pile. I was riding Molly, an old gray mare so tame you could have fallen asleep on her back and not fallen off. Pulling a “sled,” a wooden contraption on runners, with sides for hauling things like firewood and trash. I guided Molly up to the fire pile and stopped. Flipped my one leg over her back and jumped to the ground. My right foot landed smack on a 16 penny spike protruding from an old piece of wood.

The nail didn’t stab quite all the way through my foot, but it sure was stuck in there pretty deep. I recoiled in horror, sat flat on the ground on my butt, and howled in pain. Molly the horse stood there placidly, switching her tail. My brother Stephen was right there, along with Rhoda, I think. He grabbed the piece of wood and tugged. The nail slid back out, and I hobbled, screaming, to the house. Mom met me with soothing words and did what she always did when we stepped on a nail. Filled a basin with hot water and mixed in a handful of Epsom Salt. I sat there and soaked my foot, and the salt extracted whatever poisons might have been clinging to the nail. Then she applied her homemade Union salve and bandaged my foot. In about a week, I was good as new.

To this day, I swear by Epsom Salt and Mom’s homemade salve. The salve isn’t available anymore, sadly, at least not Mom’s. Her’s was the best healing salve there ever was, simply because she made it. But the Epsom Salt is available. It’s the best thing on the market that you can use for puncture wounds and sprained muscles and such. I always keep a supply in store. And I use it once or twice a year.

All of us had our share of accidents, of cuts and scrapes and bruises. From falling off wagons, struggling with runaway horses, dodging charging cows that had just calved, stepping on nails, falling into the pond, whatever. One summer evening, right at dusk, my brother Titus, barefoot as usual, stepped on the prong of a manure fork in the barn. The prong went into the bottom of his foot and came out in the back, above the heel. I was right there with him. He let out a startled yelp and sprinted to the house, leaving a spotted trail of blood behind him. I don’t remember if that incident required a visit to the doctor or not. I think it might have, to get some sort of shot of vaccine or penicillin. We figured Titus got the best of the deal, because he got to go to town.

Through it all, we strode forward into life, because it was the only life we knew. There is one thing I don’t recall. I don’t remember being sick a lot. Sure, we all got the chicken pox and the measles, as young children. And once in a blue moon, a fever swept through, a flu or a cold or some such thing. But those were rare. We just never got sick much. I still don’t, to this day. Knocking on wood, here. I’ve done some hard living since those days. Some real hard living. I still live pretty intensely, now and then.

Life is risk. So is freedom. And it doesn’t work, to attempt to remove every conceivable risk from your children, by decree or by legislation. Sure, there will be accidents. Sure, sometimes there will be tragedies. And sometimes, there will be loss. But it’s far better to live in a world with risks, and really live, than it is to trudge along in the bleak dreariness of smothering protection from every imaginable ill that might befall us.

And that’s why Amish children are more resilient and resistant to allergies. Because of how they are raised, close to the earth. Because they play in the dirt and drink raw milk and work the soil that sustains them. In a world where they are taught to work when very young, a world of risks that are simply accepted as a factor of daily life. As are the consequences of those risks.

That’s how I see it, anyway. But what do I know? I have no children. I remember what it was to be one, though. And I do know this much. From what I’ve seen of the English world around me, I am grateful that my childhood world was just exactly what it was.

My memories of that world greatly impact the way I choose to live in this one.

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To me, March has always been the endless month. The month of transition from one season to the next. I’ve even called it the cruelest month in the past. But this year, I think, the title of “endless month” must be awarded to February. Of course, March hasn’t arrived yet, and may prove worse. If it does, I figure I’ll call it something like “the eternal month.”

Anyway, this month has been blah. February. Blech. I don’t know why. It just seems to drag on and on, and it’s even the shortest month in actual days, yet. One thing, it’s the month of sports drought for me. I’m used to writing with some sort of game going on off to one side, on TV. Now I don’t have my normal noise to work with. (If this blog was sub par, blame it on that.) Football passed on after the Super Bowl. I don’t consider basketball a sport, and I refuse to watch it. Hockey kicks in now and then, sporadically. But it’s not worth watching until the playoffs start. Baseball won’t be here until April. Only good old Nascar is coming to the rescue, with the Daytona 500 this weekend. But that’s only one day a week. It’s enough to drive me to distraction.

Oh, well. Whatever March turns out to be, one thing will happen. Spring and baseball will come soon after. And this year, I am way beyond ready for that.