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“Just a little while,” he pleads.

I sigh. “I need to let you know, I’m not paying you.”

“That’s okay.”

“If you really want, then, you can finish this back section up to the tree.”

The chubby boy skips over and I give him the handles of the mower.

Tom Sawyer never had it so good. The motorless rotating cylinder, with its quiet snick-snick, has a hypnotic effect on passersby, especially if they are male and under the age of thirteen. I don’t have to do any talking—it spins its own spiel. My own two boys, now nine and four, sometimes fight over the handles. They’ve gotten feisty and require lots of projects around the house to occupy them.

But it’s not just the younger ones who become fascinated by this twirligig. Sometimes, in the corner of my eye, I catch a car creeping slowly along, trying to figure out what it is I am up to. Can he really be using a push mower like Pa did?

When this happens I sometimes rub it in, indulge a little, give the product a plug. I turn and smile and say, “You know, this thing’s actually easier to push than a power mower. They’re made out of aluminum now. And they’re quiet as can be. I never have to run to the Quik Mart to gas up. Never had to sharpen the blades in five years; you just adjust these little screws. Only cost seventy dollars…”

The car edges away, and I realize I have gone too far. Better to let the snick-snick speak for itself. Especially around here. The locals don’t like to be told what’s good for them. They love all things motorized and metallic. They’re different from the Minimites, even though they share a common German ancestry. As the tee-shirt logo truthfully says (for sale at the local gift shop catering to ogling tourists), “You can tell a German, but you can’t tell him much.” No German-American from this town has ever taken a ride on my rickshaw—only newcomers.

It’s the other newcomers here who are more likely to try something “old.” A family we know, who moved in from Michigan with ten children playing violin, cello, piano, and sundry other instruments, now lives on a ten-acre farm six miles outside of town. When they discovered we made soap, they began bartering some of their surplus cow’s milk for it. I refrained from telling them about thirsty pigs. Another couple, now raising goats and chickens in preparation for the husband’s imminent airline layoff, swaps us eggs for soap. When they come by, we invariably get entangled in a long conversation on just about every subject—except eggs and soap.

The Germans hate it. I think they are in a 1950s group-think time warp. The woman across the street told Mary that her mother, of local descent, had a quilting frame she could borrow. The day came when Mary needed it. The woman told her mother, and her mother refused to lend it out.

“That man doesn’t have a job,” she said angrily, or words to that effect.

I don’t. I don’t pull a paycheck from a gas station, a factory, a winery, or a teaching faculty. I am alone here in joblessness until the day my airline pilot/goat-breeder friend loses his. I am living more like the people did a generation or two ago in that cranky, amnesiac grandmother’s childhood. We simply don’t need much money, or miss it.

All this bothers many of my neighbors (maybe they’ve caught up to 1970 now). But there are enough newcomers here who are at the next stage. They know what the world out there is like; they’ve had enough of high technology and the corporate job market. We find plenty of company.

There’s Pieter. A local organic farmer who’s trying to wean himself from his job as a state agronomic researcher, Pieter is adept at using the system to break down the system. He landed a grant to begin a business selling wildflowers from his fifty-acre roadside plot. The road is the main route from the interstate highway to this town, though relatively quiet and untraveled. Pieter let me borrow his rototiller in the spring to plow under a strip of crabgrass along the alley where I planned to plant squash. It was too impractical to use a horse