Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [14]
Yet although they were not effusive, the Millers certainly never appeared put-upon, much less harried or overloaded, as they tooled by with a new gadget or overturned the soil or fetched our water from the spring or pointed out a telltale cloud formation or mulched their garden. And when we passed their house, at least three of the girls, often joined by Mrs. Miller, would be crouching like toads in the beet patch or bean rows. (It was in that position that I first caught one of them smiling and chatting.) From a distance the casual onlooker must have wondered how anyone could accept such a lot, apparently up to the neck in sheer subsistence activities, uncomplaining, even contented, as if it were nothing. While the whole nation around them was going to incredible extremes to avoid such work, they had gone to conscious lengths to preserve it.
Why? There was this phrase they kept repeating: “Many hands make work light.” The statement was true, though hard to explain. Gradually, as you applied yourself to your task, the threads of friendship and conversation would grow and connect you to laborers around you. Then everything suddenly became inverted. You’d forget you were working and get caught up in the camaraderie, the sense of lightened effort. This surely must rank among the greatest of labor-saving secrets. Work folded into fun and disappeared. Friendship, conversation, exercise, fresh air, all melded together into a single act of mutual self-forgetting. But why didn’t the Millers act friendlier or more outgoing in the first place?
We barely had started hoeing our own vegetables when Mrs. Jones, the Amish apprentice from the farm on our other side, her husband, Nate, and four of their children descended on us. They, like the Millers, were all business at first. They sternly warned that winter would soon be here and that we needed a larger garden if we were to get through it. Brandishing hoes and packages of seed, they helped us add two more rows of sweet potatoes, two rows of black-eyed peas, six extra rows of corn, and several rows of beets. Mabel, the Joneses’ only daughter, seeing Mary pull out weeds by hand, gave her a free lesson in hoeing. Mabel was only eight, but quite nimble. Mary earnestly took heed. (The trick was to take shorter defter strokes, rather than golfer’s swings. With her small frame, Mary was in need of this pointer since a particularly hard chop to the ground could have a pole-vaulting effect.)
And then things turned around in that inexplicable way, and we were all laughing and talking and having the liveliest time. The Joneses appeared to have learned a thing or two from the Millers.
When the Miller boys swung by with their horse to cultivate the whole garden again, they appeared placid as usual, but our sappy looks of gratitude did raise from Caleb a self-conscious half-smile.
We decided to visit the Joneses to see if they needed help in return, secretly hoping to kindle the friendship. Their place was a rustic two-story dwelling Nate had built from a design he had found in a book, using some manpower he had managed to barter from the Millers. It looked like the house of Ma and Pa Kettle. Nate said it cost him only $1,500; he had made it mainly from used materials.
The Joneses were canning beans when we arrived, so there was little we could do but watch—not enough room to assist. But we could also chat, and we did discover that their reasons for living this way were purely doctrinal; that the Bible, for instance, required all women to wear head coverings. Nate, it turned out, was fond of quoting passages from Scripture that seemed to support practices like this. Another example he gave was the commandment to observe the Sabbath, which he upheld by worshipping on Saturday and working on Sunday.