Growing Up Amish - Ira Wagler [5]
It’s a strange but indisputable fact: Even among the Amish, other Amish seem odd.
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Few sights are cuter than Amish children. Little girls dressed in their bonnets and tiny, perfect, caped dresses; boys in homemade pants, galluses, and straw hats. Miniature adults are what they look like.
I was one of them. Probably not quite as perfectly coifed as Lancaster Amish children, the ones you see in picture books. I was a bit more ragged. Barefoot, mostly, in summer. Snot nosed and dirty from playing around the farm and on the muddy banks of our pond.
The ninth Wagler child out of eleven, I grew up amid the clamor and bustle of ten siblings. Five brothers and five sisters, each with his or her own unique quirks and personalities.
Rosemary was the oldest. Born while Dad was away doing service as a conscientious objector to World War II, she barely knew him. In fact, when he did make his rare visits home, she was afraid of him. He tried to calm her, and once he picked her up and playfully tossed her in the air. As he caught her, she broke her arm. She screamed in pain and remained terrified of him for months after that.
Rosemary was seventeen when I was born, and I have only faint memories of her in our home. When I was four years old, she married Joseph Gascho, a stern, hard-core Amish man, and they moved to a farm about a mile north and west of ours.
Magdalena arrived two years after Rosemary. She was a sensitive, softhearted child who loved animals and could not bear to see anything or anyone suffer. Once, after some stray cats arrived at our farm, the boys threatened to shoot them. (We already had enough cats.) Maggie, determined to find them new homes, fashioned paper signs with the words “Please feed me” on them and taped them to the cats. Then she tenderly carried the cats in a box over the hill to the east and released them by the road and quickly dashed back home. Surely, she thought, someone would pick them up and care for them. Sadly, the cats could run faster than Maggie and were awaiting her at home when she arrived.
My brother Joseph came next, the firstborn son. I’m sure my father secretly sighed with relief when Joseph came along. Now there was a son to carry on the Wagler name. Tall and lithe with a ready smile, Joseph was an admired figure in my childhood. Of all my siblings, his temperament is closest to mine. Brooding, melancholy, intense, but outgoing and friendly, too. As a young teenager, he once overworked a team while tilling the fields. One of the horses collapsed and died from the heat. Joseph struggled with the guilt of that for months.
Naomi was tall and dark, and she could sing. As a child, she sang with Dad almost every evening, just the two of them. She nicknamed me “Bobby” when I was little. Where she came up with that name, I don’t know. Didn’t make a lot of sense, but it didn’t have to. She was my older sister, and I loved her.
Jesse was shy and withdrawn and stuttered as a child. After the family moved to Aylmer, Jesse was befriended by the elderly English couple who lived on the farm just east of ours. Of all my brothers and sisters, he was their favorite. They called him Buster Brown. Jesse grew into a stocky, burly youth and left home before I was ten years old.
Rachel was vivacious and outgoing, always smiling or singing, or both. An outstanding cook, she tirelessly fed us all. She knew what was going on in and around the community, who was in trouble and why, who said what and where. Even today, if I need to contact someone from the distant past, someone I haven’t seen for decades, I notify Rachel, and she always gets it done.
Stephen was the only one of my father’s sons who could till the earth and make it produce. He worked hard and demanded the same efforts from us. He took the initiative while still a teenager and worked the home farm. Cleaned it up. Plowed and planted fields that had lain fallow for decades. A natural leader, he led his