Why I Write Amish Fiction

Why I Write Amish Fiction

I drank in the images of the Amish community, as if I were a thirsty explorer having stumbled upon an oasis: the greenhouse redolent with blooms; the sturdy grandmother in the beige kerchief watching us Englischer customers with a mixture of curiosity and censure (I was wearing cargo pants); a toddler girl, in a dark purple dress, adjusting her bonnet with prim, dimpled hands and then shyly smiling up at me; the little boy, Monroe, with the uneven bowl cut, carrying a twenty-five pound sack of potting soil out to my van with no visible effort, though it was about half his size.

Being there, breathing there, was like stepping into another world, located only fifteen miles from our solar-powered farm in Wisconsin. A world I haven’t inhabited since I was a young girl visiting a farm in Kentucky, wearing a jean skirt and pigtail braids, and playing kick ball like I really belonged amongst my Old Order Mennonite peers.

Like most things in life, absence makes the heart grow fonder, and I didn’t realize how deep my love for the Plain people ran until I was away from them. Being reunited, even if with strangers, somehow made me feel like I was back home, with family.

I left Miller’s Greenhouse, stowed my girls in the van, and drove up the hill toward the bakery, which was in a building—festooned with flower baskets—toward the back of the farm. The farmhouse and the barns were all white-washed and pristine. I stared at the long-range views of the unglaciered hills as the windmill kept an even tempo above me.

Martha (one of six sisters and one brother, twenty-nine years old, unmarried, though last time I teased her that this could change very soon) came out to the store from the farmhouse once she saw she had a customer.

We said hello and made small talk, then I scanned the darkened aisles and picked up a cherry and a blackberry pie with thick, glistening crusts and hearts cut out of the centers. A pie weighting each hand, I saw someone dart past my peripheral vision. I turned my body and almost—comically—averted my gaze, because the young Amish woman’s hair was long and loose and sun-streaked brown: the first unkapped hair I’ve ever seen in a community.

That skein of hair must’ve touched the hem of her royal-blue cape dress, overlaid with an emerald apron, but it instead fluttered and swirled behind her as she moved–bare feet flitting, caught. She was beautiful, stunning in a way that must’ve made the Plain community worry, for she was anything but plain.

She smiled, somewhat sheepishly, and waved. “Hi!”

I waved back and smiled, though I was caught off-guard by her open manner when the other women I’d met that day (excluding her sister, Martha) were anything but open. Then she was gone, like a phantom heroine from a future book.

And I thought to myself—staring down at my homemade pies—that this is why I write Amish fiction. Not to tap into a niche market, but because I love historical elements (horse and buggies, lamplight, straw hats and hand-sewn dresses, pies baked from scratch in a cast-iron stove) colliding with a modern world, where the outcome of such an impact is anything but simple.

How ’bout you? Have you ever visited a Mennonite or Amish community? If so, what was your experience?