Standing there, I was peering out the wavy window in the front living room toward the roadway. Waiting for my wife to return with the rest of the children. Kinda of hard to see out of, these old, blurry windows. Timmy I had here with me. Being seven years old, I had kept him behind to help me with some of the chores. Always chores. No matter what time of day really. Upon waking. After breakfast. Arriving home from work. It didn’t matter. There were always chores to be done, especially on a Saturday like today. Milk the cows. Feed the horses. Check the batteries. With my son’s help, we had whipped through all these things and more a bit faster than I would have been able to handle by myself. So, there I stood looking out the window into the white, grainy day here in hot and humid July.

       “When will Mom and everyone be home?” my son asked me in our native tongue.

       “Soon, Son, I hope.”

       A pause behind me as little Timmy wrestled with some of the magazines that were lain out on the coffee table there. English magazines. Yeah, we had a little fun I guess you would say—a little liberalism. Not to say they wouldn’t suddenly disappear the once or twice every year we would host church. Yeah, they’d disappear for sure. Far, far away—carried away in the trash far from here.

       As my son was on his knees flipping through one of them, he asked me, “Dad, what was it like being English?”

       Oh, he knew. He sure did. I had heard his mother tell him many times. About how his father used to be English, but had decided to choose the right path. The path of an Amish person. God was pleased. I was saved.

       My eyes fixed there looking to the outside, I put my hand to my chin and contemplated. It’s an amazing thing that I had decided to join the Amish those thirteen years ago. Yes, that’s what I had decided to do in fact. It was all true what his mother had told him. I had chosen that path way back then. Of course, I had met Sarah first. For sure. She was a big part of it. Let’s be real. Growing up near here, I had met her when my church was doing some outreach in the community. A group of us went to a nearby grocery (Amish of course) to get some fruit for our ‘community’ event. There she was. One of the helpers. One of the fruit-gatherers. And let’s just say that day—yes—that day, she started the process of picking a pretty hefty piece of fruit. And it would be for herself.

       Sure, I had been English. This was back when I was twenty four-years old. Sarah, well, she was twenty one or two I think (there is two and half years between us). I was raised in a pretty strict, conservative church. Both mom and dad were pretty stern. They’re gone now. It’d been a few years since my mom had died. Anyway, growing up, I had always seen the Amish around, but never really paid them a whole lot of attention. Of course, my dad would do business with them occasionally at the insurance company. You know, the ones who actually purchased insurance for their business, which was just a few. Really never paid much attention to them. They always stood out, though, because they wore those plain, plain clothes. Spoke with kind of a funny accent. Even had their own language. A language I knew well now.

       I paused thinking how to answer my son. What should I tell him? The Amish were the role models. English were not supposed to be viewed in a particularly positive light. Part of that I believed. Well, being Amish now, I had to believe that. I was married to an Amish woman, and my children were being raised Amish. So, I had to be careful here. And think carefully. Couldn’t paint the English in too good of a light that might make my son question or wonder about why we were different, we we weren’t English ourselves. But why were we different? Really is all about the religion, about God. That’s why. We sought be the salt on the earth—to be a people prepared to meet our Creator. And in doing that, we would try to make him pleased with what we did on a daily basis. Through our actions. Our words. What we did, and what we didn’t do.

       “Son, it was a godless life. A life just doing whatever we wanted to do, without regard to God and what he tells us in his Word.” I thought that was a good ‘why’ to start the answer. It was true, at least compared to the Amish. Sure, I was raised conservative, but it was about Sunday more than anything. It wasn’t about the daily grind. I went to public school with everyone else. I drove a car. I watched TV. Listened to music. Smoked cigarettes even, much to the dismay of my parents. Even had a little temper. Got in a couple fights. But they didn’t know about that.

       The sound of a tractor in the distance went rumbling by faintly. I could see our neighbor on it across the roadway. That prompted my son. “Why don’t we use tractors, Dad?”

       I chuckled a little bit. Turned around. Walked over to were he was leaning on the coffee table there, looking at the magazine. There he was in with his crossed-over suspenders, dark blue shirt, and black pants. Blonde hair just like his mother's. We were looking practically the same today, except for my brown hair and the fact I was wearing a tan-colored shirt. Sat down on the couch behind him.

       “Let me see that magazine.” He quickly handed to me.

       There was a car advertisement there on the page. A typical black sedan. Nothing really extraordinary. “You know,” I said, “I had a car just like this. Expect mine was gold.”

       “Wow,” Timmy exclaimed, as if I meant real gold.

       “No, no, Son,” I said, chuckling again. “It wasn’t made out of real gold. But that’s the color it was painted. I drove that thing all round, kinda of like the tractor across the way.”

       “Did you go fast?” he enthusiastically asked.

       “Yeah, there were a couple of times I went really fast. That was the problem, though. It was all too fast. Rushing from here to there. When you’re going that fast, you kind of miss it all. You don’t see everything. You don’t take it in. You, well, you sort of miss life.”

       “It seems like it would be fun,” Timmy replied.

       “I guess you can’t really understand,” I said. “You would have live it to know what I am talking about. I think if you did, you wouldn’t like it. I don’t think there is a better life than the one we have right now. The one I have. No, I don’t think I would trade it for anything in the world. Any other life.”

       I turned the page in the magazine and there was an article about India. Desert people in India, of all things.

       My son, who was now sitting next to me on the couch, said, “Even to go there?”pointing at the man walking past the large sand dunes in the desert.

       “Even to go there.”

       My son took the magazine out of my hands, and was sort of holding it up close to his face so he could really absorb the picture. I don’t know if he really understood what I was talking about, or what I meant. Would he ever understand the difference between his current life and the life of the world? I had lived in the world as one of their own. He never had, and hopefully never would. Though, I had my doubts. Like a lot of Amish children, he had his curiosity set toward the world. Wondering what it was like—what it would like to be English. It’s interesting how things always look better over there. There’s that human tendency to want what we don’t have. Or to want, more specifically, what is forbidden, what we aren’t allowed to have.

       Deep things to consider. As I sat there, my ears picked up the sound of the buggy making its way up the driveway. That sound. You can’t miss it. Of course, in our district, we aren’t allowed rubber coverings on our wheels. So those steel wheels really make a lot of noise. And grind away they did against the rocks. Timmy heard it soon after me and leaped up and ran toward the window right in front of us and looked out. “They’re back!” he exclaimed, somewhat excitedly. Kind of half ho hum about it and half excited. It was his sisters after all, who were back with his mother.

       My feet hit the floor and I made my way over to the door next to where my son was standing. I stepped out onto the porch and he right after me. We began the decent down toward the still rolling buggy. The sun was high in the sky, trying to shine through the clouds but just making everything bright gray. The hands started waving about from the buggy as my wife and three daughters saw us coming. From the market in town they were coming. Fresh fruit, some bread, perhaps a couple pies. Hopefully a couple pies. Apple? That’s what I was really, truth be told, looking forward to. And who knows what else they picked up? Sarah really liked to go into our nearby small town to get stuff. I think it was fun for her. Though, I think it is in the blood of every woman to love to shop, no matter what it is they are shopping for. It can be furniture, clothes, or food—doesn’t seem to matter.

       The black, steel wheels came to a stop there in front of our large, white farmhouse. The girls quickly dropped out of the side. Being eight, six, and four, they were young and full of energy. I helped my wife out, taking her by the hands, being sure her dress cleared the doorway. Almost had to lift her. And I could have. She was well. Tired from the drive I think, but well. I followed the back of her white bonnet to the orange triangle. Pulling down the soft door, she showed me what she had purchased. Well, really, my daughters showed me, bonnets jumping up and turning about as they explained it. Yes, a couple crates of strawberries. Some blueberries. A couple apple pies (I was thankful for that). And, also a loaf of bread. All sounded good. And it would go fast with my hungry children.

       The kids raced the food up to the house and at that point, and with them skipping up there, I held my wife in my arms and hugged her for a moment. She then preceded toward the house where my son and daughters had gone and I got into the side of the buggy. Drove it up to the small, somewhat dilapidated wooden shed next to our house. It was the carriage shed. Just big enough to store the buggy. Really, I needed to fix this thing up one of these days. I grabbed the English newspaper off the bench that had been kindly picked up for me in town. Unlatched the horse and walked him over to his stable where our other horses were. That was bigger building, an actual barn I guess you would say.

       Stepping back out of the horse barn, I held up the newspaper in the sunlight to see what was going on in the English world. It was nice my wife even picked it up for me, because I remember back when I first asked her to years ago, she would object and say the Amish don’t read English newspapers. We don’t need to know the information. I looked over a few headlines. The President making oil deals with countries overseas. Another murder in the big city. A child kidnapped and no one knows where he is. Did I really need to know all this? Did I want to? Perhaps it was something I missed from my old life? But I think my wife was right. Yeah, I should listen to Sarah more. I grabbed an empty stainless steel water canister there in the horse barn, through the paper in it, lit a match, and burnt it to a toast.

       The little white plates were sat out. The knife slowly bore down on the pie. Each child came up and got their slice right after Sarah dished them out. The little plates made their way over to the dinner table. As Sarah was about to cut me a slice, I gently stopped her. I grasped her by her arms, and in her left ear I whispered to her that I would do it. I always tried to show affection toward my wife in front of my children. I wanted them to see that. I wanted them to see how much I loved their mom. My hope was that in the future, when they were married, they would have the same kind of relationship with their partners. My son surely could model, and my daughters, well, they should expect this kind of affection from their husbands.

       I cut a piece for her and myself and placed them there on the plates. We carried ours over and sat down at the table with the children. I slowly ate my pie, little bite by little bite, enjoying every last part. After all, delicious food such as this wasn’t here every day. We didn’t have a refrigerator bursting full of deserts to be had at any moment like a lot of the English do. Or, like I use to. No, our refrigerator usually just had the necessities. Fresh stuff, though, like eggs and milk, but like I said, the necessities. That’s the way it was, the way we lived.

       And after I rested my fork on my plate, I couldn’t help but sit there and wonder about the whole thing. Wonder about the life I now had. Think about the way things could have been if I had remained English. If I had married English. Certainly, things would have been different. But, truth be told, as I looked around at my well-behaved children sitting there, and then up into the blue eyes of my wife with that golden hair peaking out around the edges, I realized I wouldn’t trade any of it for all the offerings of the English world. No, not by any chance. I really had life, with all the goodness God could give. I wouldn’t go back to the world of the newspaper for anything. No, never.

- Daniel Litton

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