Growing Up Amish - Ira Wagler [7]
At age six they went to school with their peers. Swinging their lunch pails, they trudged the dirt roads to the one-room, public country schoolhouse where they learned their letters and figures, and to read and write and cipher.
They graduated from elementary school after the eighth grade, but Dad hungered for more. More knowledge. More education. So he was allowed to complete a mail-order course and receive his high school diploma, a rare and odd thing at the time. He was the only one among his peers who had the slightest inclination to do so. And he was the only one who did.
The years passed, and David and Ida Mae grew into young adulthood. Dad was a sturdy, handsome young man. And Mom developed into an astonishingly beautiful young woman. I take Dad’s word on that. No photos of her from that time survive.
They married on February 3, 1942, when he was twenty-one and she was five months shy of her nineteenth birthday. From the start, Dad did not get on well with Mom’s family. The Yoders were laid back, more relaxed about things like church rules, and they viewed my father with some suspicion. This man, who had stepped in and snatched one of their most beautiful eligible females, came from a long line of strident hard-liners. You were Amish, or you were nothing. In Amish society, the wife takes on the husband’s identity, not vice versa. So the Yoders had reason to somberly reflect on what the future might hold for their daughter.
My father maintained an uneasy truce with Mom’s extended family for about five years. Then a group broke away and left the Old Order. Founded a new church that allowed cars and electricity. And telephones in the house. Lured by the prospect of modern conveniences, my mother’s parents and all but one of her siblings left and joined the new church. This deeply grieved and angered my father.
After an exploratory trip to Piketon, Ohio, where a small new Amish settlement was struggling to life, my father decided to move there. And so he bought a farm in Piketon, and within a few months, they sold their farm and many of their possessions and left Daviess. My mother was sad. And pregnant with her third daughter. But she had little, if anything, to say in the matter. She went along dutifully, as was befitting and expected of an Amish wife. From that day on, she was pretty much separated from her close family ties and her roots in Daviess County.
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Our farm in Aylmer was located along the main drag, toward the eastern end of the settlement. It was a functioning farm, of course, with wagons and horse-drawn machinery parked here and there around the buildings and in the pasture. The barnyard was home to a herd of ragtag, mixed-breed draft and driving horses; twenty or so head of beef cattle; and a couple of cows that kept us supplied with fresh milk.
Dad usually had a few hogs around, and Mom kept a flock of chickens in a coop in the barn for fresh eggs. Tack on our collie dog and a half dozen wiry, half-wild mouser cats that were responsible for feeding themselves, and there you have it.
That was home.
Rambling and unkempt, but home.
Because Aylmer was somewhat progressive, we were allowed to have running water in the house. There was one lone bathroom, with a toilet and bathtub, and once a week, on Saturday night, each of us took a bath.
In winter, Mom cooked on a wood-burning stove in the kitchen. In summer, she used a kerosene stove. In the mid-1960s, Dad added a concrete-block wing to the south side of the house. A summer kitchen and washhouse, we called it. During summer months, we set up the large table and pretty much ate all our meals there.
Most mornings, all of us would sit around the table eating toast and eggs and Mom’s homemade biscuits covered in dark, rich gravy. After the meal was finished, we would sit quietly as Dad took up the German Bible and read a passage of Scripture.
Then we would kneel while he prayed aloud one of the old High German prayers from the little black prayer book. It was always comforting and calming to