....Continued.
Years ago, when I was in high school, the season of Autumn arrived, as is typical for it to do. And Autumn, being a particularly lovely season in our neck of the woods, being particularly resplendent with deep colors and perfectly crisp air, has always been what I would consider to be a particularly good time for a wedding (yes, I intended to use "particularly" three times in a one sentence).
My young Amish neighbor apparently thought so too.
She....we will call her Edna....had been engaged to a man with a cheerful disposition for a while, but as is their custom it only became public knowledge two weeks before when they got "announced" at church.
Wedding prep is a flurry in those two weeks. Friends and relations from literally all over the country make arrangements to halt their life and travel in, all the preparations that have to be done in broad daylight have to be arranged, and goodness sakes is there ever a larger amount of food to make...
Weddings are a BIG DEAL to Amish. This is where you meet potential future spouses, this is where you see family and friends you haven't seen since the last wedding, this is where you get caught up on everyone's life in more detail that what you put into a hand-written letter. It truly is a central feature to their social life, and unlike typical American culture, the men love weddings just as much as the girls do.
But cooking for a crowd as big as a wedding affords poses a problem when you are doing it in a house without refrigeration. In October most things can just be kept out in the cooled-by-autumn-air porch.... but what about all that MEAT?
That is something English-speaking neighbors come in handy for.
Our neighbors further down the road were happy to lend them their spare freezer and they piled and piled and piled in something like 100+ pounds of chicken.
The night before the wedding Jonas, along with two cousins who traveled in from Ohio, went to get the chicken from the neighbor, and on their way home stopped in to hang out with us for a while. Jonas said that he wanted us to meet his cousins, but whether or not that was true, and whether or not that was actually just a ruse so his cousins to see our house and drink our orange pop is neither here nor there.
I remember sitting and talking and having a fun little time like usual with them. Amish or not, 20 year old men are just 20 year old men, with the only exceptions being that a 20 year old Amish man quite potentially is married, has his own business, knows how to build a house with his bare hands from the ground up, can speak and write at least two languages fluently, has a bowl-cut haircut, writes in beautiful cursive much like the forefathers of America, and is essentially an expert in all things equestrian. But besides that, nothing much is different. :) So we had conversation like anyone would have conversation with 20 year old men.
I suppose they left our house around 10 that night and we didn't think much of it. I got ready for bed as usual, and had just retired to my room with a novel when knock-knock-knock, my mother comes to my door.
"Are you up for an adventure?" she asks.
Never one to turn down a closing-in-on-midnight escapade, I responded with a hearty affirmation and got myself redressed.
Upon entering the kitchen I was met by my mother, now also dressed, who said, "Well, the horse has run away.."
"What horse?"
"Jonas' horse. The one that was tied to our house while he was in here with us. The one that is carrying 100 pounds of chicken in the buggy strapped to it for the wedding in the morning....!"
"OH. MY. WORD."
Amish weddings without protein are not to be borne!!
Jonas returned with his cousins, as well as their fathers this time, and we decided that I would take Jonas and two of the cousins in my car, mom would take the dads and a cousin in her van, and off we went; like a fleet of rescue ships in the night.
Not knowing which way the horse had retreated, mom went one way with her troupe and I went the other, declaring the wedding site as our next meeting spot.
Now, despite the fact that the entire wedding meal for 300+ people was hanging in the balance on our Christopher Columbus skills did not seem to dampen our spirits. Even if the stakes are high, chasing a fleeing horse in the midnight hour with a car full of Amish boys and galavanting around the country-side can only be something that elicits quite the blithe set of emotions. We were all in something of a fuss.
On we gaily travelled, turning into every field driveway we came across and scanning the earth with my headlights, surveying every security-light lit yard, and chattering to each other in a cacophony of English and Pennsylvania Dutch, blending together like the proverbial oil and water, until I yelled to be heard "HEY NOW!!! If we are in my car, we speak English, because I know you boys are talking about me!!!" which was met by an even louder chorus of hoops and hollers and whatever the 20-year-old-Amish-boy equivalent to giggling is.
Onward still, ahead into the night we progressed. With no avail of finding the runaway horse with a buggy full of chicken, we came to the home where the wedding festivities were taking place in something less than 12 hours. Now this "driving in the driveway" business might not come across as a strange feat to you, but how often do you think that, not one, but two cars with bright shining headlights drive down a long Amish lane at midnight?!
Exactly.
Strange as it might seem in our hypersonic society, this was not something that goes unnoticed and was most definitely something you write home about, all the more clearly evidenced by every window pane being filled with at least three sleepy Amish heads peering out to see who had come for an ill-timed visit.
The boys rushed the house in a flurry of denim and straw hats to be met by kerosene lanterns now illuminating every crook and cranny of the large abode. Not two minutes later my boys emerge with more flashlights....and more Amish boys.
Everybody wanted in on the midnight foray.
Exceeding the seatbelt limits of my car, into my Dodge stratus now piled two more 20-somethings, making us a hunting party of 6.
The buzz in the vehicle now would have exceeded any hive and I had to lay down my English-only law again in almost no time at all. Do you know how hard it is the understand a punch line when it's said in Pennsylvania Dutch?!!! I would not accept to be left out of all the good jokes.
In a blaze of red tail lights we zipped out of the yard, heading for another place the horse might have known to go, still surveying the land for our runner.
But how had the horse gotten UNTIED I kept wondering? It all seems to me that something was smelling a little fishy...
At last we come to Jonas' best friends' house, thinking that maybe the horse knew to go there because it had been so many time, and to our delight as my headlights scanned the yard..............there was the horse!!!
And there was the buggy!
And there was the chicken!!!
All of them nicely tied up to a post.
WAIT.
What?!?!
Tied up???
:)
It would seem we all had fallen for quite the practical joke.
I don't know that stealing a buggy could quite be considered Grand Theft Auto, but it seemed to me from that point on that I really was right about all these boys. Amish or not, bowl-cut haircut or not, strange accent or not, a 20 year old boy.....is a 20 year old boy.
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