Amish people work. Often they farm, but they also work in other jobs and businesses. Their church recommends acceptable types of work, which may vary among churches. If they can’t work, they rely on their families and communities for help. Amish usually don’t accept welfare, food stamps or use unemployment insurance.
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Just a short note to share an experience and a memory. Today I went out to our deck to contemplate. Usually I mix a little prayer with a meditation on some aspect of life, then try to move to what I call contemplation: just sit with God—being aware of His presence—and experience what’s true and loving. Today I woke early and went out before dawn.
In November I traveled to the Big Valley (Kishacoquillas Valley) in central Pennsylvania, about 70 miles northwest of Harrisburg. The Big Valley is home to three or more Amish groups, yet it’s off the well-worn paths around Lancaster, PA. Amish people wear their religion on their sleeves, heads, legs and feet. They travel in old ways with horses and buggies, maintain their homes without most modern conveniences and are among the remaining successful family farmers. They make their own clothes, prepare wonderful food, hardly eat in restaurants, restrict their interaction with outsiders, marry within their religion, and form tight-knit communities. Amish people believe God asks them to live this way. Despite all these differences from the rest of the U.S., their populations appear to be growing and there is a general diaspora among Amish communities: the children grow up, get baptized in their church, marry, and often move out to new places where they buy farms, start businesses, have children, and form new communities.
My mother, Loretta Flick
Just read a column in the Wall Street Journal by a fellow who told of the first time he brought home a centerfold of a partially nude young woman. This happened in the early 1980s, when his hormones were in their teens. His mother was clever, he said, in that she asked him if it was right to steal. He replied, “No.” Continue reading
In the Painted Desert of Arizona, April 2018
From east to west, our country presents a beautiful array of landforms and ecosystems. After crossing the Mississippi River, travelers head gradually uphill until the Continental Divide. Through the High Plains the world gets dryer, and soon travelers are rolling across vast expanses of desert. Along I40-west the country turns dry in the Texas Panhandle, then dryer still through New Mexico and Arizona. On a first crossing, the biggest impression may be poverty, especially if poverty means lacking. There is little of everything except dirt, brush, rocks, and views of landforms. After a few crossings, however, the deserts offer an enchantment that grows with each visit. Continue reading
Last weekend we attended a dinner to celebrate the 50th wedding anniversary of friends. Two other long-term couples we knew also attended, and there were family and other friends as well. We four couples connected through our wives, all of whom were classmates and friends in nursing school many years ago. Our first toast was to long marriages, especially to that of our hosts. What makes them work, we asked? Continue reading
Hofer’s World Rye
Early life is a time for big adventures, like the army, college, marriage. Later life is for small adventures, like finding a new author or visiting a distant bakery. Continue reading
Old phone reminds me of the phone we had at the Ranger School in 1963, though ours had coin receptacles and a rotary dial.
Last winter, my younger brother, Bill, showed me a notebook I left at home over 50 years ago. It had two pages of expense entries from the summer of 1962, after graduating from high school, and from 1963, when I attended the New York State Ranger School, a forestry technician school in the western Adirondack Mountains of New York. Money spent: I wanted to see what the entries might tell. Continue reading
Sea lions lounge on rocks along the Oregon coast
If the interior West exudes space, solitude, and silence, the Pacific Coast offers drama: isolated beaches, quaint towns, high cliffs, shifting mist and rain, and a coastline littered with large rock formations. We visited the Pacific Coast in early June, before the travel season peaked and, luckily, when the weather was good. Continue reading
Redbuds and forsythia at sunrise signaling a new season
A Short History of Later Living
I’ve neglected this blog for some months, but I’m now ready to revive it.
Back in late 2011 when I started, two motives dominated. First, I wanted to see if I could write a weekly post or column (it’s not easy). Second, I wanted to figure out retirement for myself (how should I live in retirement?). Continue reading