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Two older Miller sons, Ellis and Jed, worked over the pumpkin ground using the disk, an array of sharp-edged steel wheels that sliced the soil at an angle and overturned it. The boys curved slowly by as they stood on the implement and acknowledged my presence with a nod.

Mindful of my need for cash income, Mr. Miller asked his son-in-law, Sylvan, whether he might reserve an additional half-acre of ground some distance away on which to grow sorghum. Sylvan consented. Mr. Miller wanted only thirty dollars for the year to rent the pumpkin patch, and asked only another thirty dollars for the assistance with the horses, the implements, and the boys. Sylvan merely wanted help with his own sorghum crop.

Mrs. Miller, meanwhile, invited Mary over for a day to teach her canning techniques, and they were joined by another nonnative woman, Mrs. Jones. She, by a remarkable coincidence, was also a city dweller who had learned by chance of this unusual group and with her husband and children had moved to the vicinity to learn from them. They lived only half a mile away.

Mrs. Miller, besides lending us her spare stove, offered a huge outdoor kettle to provide a water bath for canned fruits.

The assistance took us off guard. Often it came before we even knew we needed it: a reminder to plant or pick, the loan of a wheel-hoe or an axe. We tried to thank our advisers, but they were quick to deflect praise. “Why”—an imperceptible hoot—“no trouble at all.” “We were”—slight tone of incredulity—“going by anyway!” “We’re just”—arms akimbo—“doing what everyone else used to.” And in a final effort to put us at our ease: “Many hands make work light!”

And many hands there were: two each for Amos, age eleven; Caleb, twelve; Judy, fifteen; Ellis, sixteen; Irma, seventeen; Jed, eighteen; and Harold, twenty-two, all swarming about us and related by way of common parenthood. These constituted our immediate neighbors: the Miller family. But they might well have been members of a special Amish ambulance crew assigned to monitor our vital signs and minister to our slightest fluctuations in well-being. They performed this duty with the quiet expertise of trained medics.

At the same time, there was something babylike in their rosy faces utterly foreign to my modern experience, as if they were shepherds just returned from the manger—those slightly dimpled, perfectly oval faces with open, peaceable expressions. The boys were so well mannered that they seemed feminine in their delicacy and sensitivity to our wants.

Through it all Mr. Miller, their supervisor, gave orders while hardly speaking a word. Where he, like the others, was articulate I was in the motions of his hands and eyes. From what little I could tell of the brood so far, I had already begun to imagine that they’d whittled the secret of felicity down to a modest repertoire of deft movements, a brief lexicon of telling glances.

The push buttons of modern technology never seemed clunkier. If this was indeed a parallel world I’d entered, it was not some frozen time capsule. Its residents were alive and adaptable. And in the short time I’d been here, I was beginning to see evidence that a world without modern technology need not be any harder. It might well be easier. And more fun.

Three

Lightening Up

Something in the Millers’ half-smiles suggested that if I was onto some of their secrets, I hadn’t uncovered them all. And if my hunches were correct, there should be more to technological mastery than reducing the workload. Something else should expand—the realm of leisure, liberty, or higher human fulfillment. The body, liberated, should find solace in its partner, the mind.

Yet except when their lips curled or their eyes winked, our neighbors remained nearly deadpan. They could have sprung right out of the Amish picture books. The men’s beards were scraggly, their brows furrowed. They said little. Even the women maintained an emotional distance somewhere between cautious and grave. The paucity of words gave conversations