Louise Stoltzfus - Amish Women

Cover photo by Jerry Irwin.

Illustrations on the front and back covers, pages by Florence Starr Taylor. Copyright 1986.

All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Design by Dawn J. Ranck

AMISH WOMEN

1994 by Good Books, Intercourse, PA 17534

First published in hardcover in 1994 (ISBN: 1-56148-129-7)

PAPERBACK EDITION, 1997.

International Standard Book Number: 978-1-56148-228-3

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 94-34166

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, without permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stoltzfus, Louise, 1952

Amish women: lives and stories/Louise Stoltzfus.

p. cm.

1. Amish womenPennsylvaniaLancaster County. 2. Lancaster County (Pa.)Social life and customs. 3. Lancaster County (Pa.)Biography. I. Title.

F157.L2S77 1997

305.48687dc20

94-34166

CIP

I was once Amish. Sometimes it seems I should say, I am still Amish. For I have found it impossible to separate my life as an Amish person from my life as a late twentieth-century career woman. I am like the women who nurtured me. The values of my mother and my grandmothers still inform my decisions and my choices. They probably always will. I cannot escape who I am. I am schooled in the ways of the Amish.

I enjoy plain things.

The warmth of an Amish kitchen.

The smell of farms in early spring.

The fall harvest of gardens and fields.

The feelings of family and home.

Sometimes I long to sit in a quiet house lit by a gas lantern and spend an evening quilting or reading or talking with children. No television. No stereo. No telephone. None of the convenient distractions of the jet age.

Sometimes I even wonder what it would take for me to become Amish again. Could I give up these trappings of the world? Could I really go back to driving a horse and buggy? Could I think like an Amish woman? I doubt it, but still I wonder.

Both of my grandmothers were Amish women born in Lancaster County in the last years of the nineteenth century. They married in 1911 and 1913 and lived quite similar, yet very different, lives.

My Grandmother Fannie came from a long line of strong women who took no nonsense from anyone. They made decisions. They married well. Some never married at all. They worked hard and loved and flourished and died.

My Grandmother Mary came from a line of weaker women. They were sometimes sickly and frustrated and occasionally even hopeless and depressed. But Grandmother Mary and the women who came after her took hope in one oft-repeated story.

Several generations before Grandmother Marys time, a native American woman fell in love with her Amish neighbor, joined his church, and married him. According to legend, she was full of life and energy and brought spirit and hope to that particular European Amish line. Grandmother Mary married into that family. It is said the native characteristics still appear in the dark features and burnished looks of many of the descendants of that woman.

Thats the reason for the wild blood, they all used to shake their heads and say.

The Ebersol women from whom Grandmother Fannie came were anything but wild. They were staid and straight and sometimes even sour. They had orderly rows in their gardens. They religiously cleaned their houses upside down and inside out every spring and fall They insisted on speaking pure German and corrected anyone who let the English-isms of Pennsylvania Dutch sneak into their late nineteenth-century language. No one pushed them around. But no one had much fun with them either.

It was said that when my great-grandmother Mary Ebersol Lapp married, she did not marry as well as her sisters would have liked. They did not approve of her husband-to-be or his lazy streak, as they called it. They would rather not marry than have him for a husband. But Great-Grandmother defied them and married anyway.

My Grandmother Fannie inherited some of both her mothers Ebersol austerity and her fathers carefree Lapp love for life. She filled her kitchen, her children, and her grandchildren with homemade rootbeer floats, sandtarts, soda water, stewed crackers, turkey filling, fried oysters, eggs poached in milk, and mashed potatoes to die for. Her garden overflowed with fresh spring onions, radishes, turnips, and even an occasional exotic vegetable such as kohlrabi, for which we always pined during its long gestation period. She surrounded herself with rows of burgeoning grapevines, huckleberry bushes, and fruit trees. The weed-free flowers in her beds seemed to dance and laugh.

Grandmother Fannie also always found time to relax. Her father had taught her well. She rarely missed reading the funnies in the daily Intelligencer Journal . She invited tired grandchildren into her arms and held us close. She berated Dawdy (our name for Grandpa) for teasing the little ones and told on him everytime, assuring our skeptical, frightened eyes that there were no bogeymen down by the creek, but even so, we could not go down there alone to play.

She taught us to adore the great, old house in which she lived.

Where she was born.

Where she married.

Where she gave birth to nine children.

Where she died.

She let us slide down the magnificent open stairway banister. She watched us play hide-and-go-seek in her dimly lit warm rooms while she visited with Dad and Mom and all the other aunts and uncles. She punched holes in the tops of mayonnaise jars and laughed as we ran around her front yard on balmy summer evenings catching lightning bugs.

Grandmother Fannie wore long, nondescript dresses of dark colors that folded around her slowly expanding, sagging, and aging frame. She pinned on her caps, capes, and aprons. Her hair slowly went from black to steel gray.

Always before we leftlate at night, after dark, and when it was long past time for everyone to be in bedshe led us to the rolltop desk beside her bed where she hid her candy stash. The candy always softened the pain in our tearful eyes as we reluctantly left her side after spending another glorious day in her domain.

Once in a great while, Grandmother Fannie could be coaxed to recount the story of her wedding day. December 14, 1911. She told of tables overflowing with the bounty of Amish life, friends gathered from throughout the Lancaster County Amish community, relatives who traveled from Ontario, and two precious, stolen moments on the staircase.

Grandmothers eyes always twinkled as she remembered coming around the sharp turn in the enclosed middle stairway of their house and finding herself alone with her new husband for the first time on that impossibly busy day. What did they do? She never would tell us.