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| Amish girl making waffles at the Lapp Valley Farm |
Last June, Bob and I visited Pennsylvania. Nothing was the way we thought it would be. To collect my thoughts, I wrote the piece below.
An Amish Dinner
“Come in,” David said, shaking our hands. “I’m Lynda Lapp,” I said, entering the kitchen. I knew I could have been Lynda Mcguillicuddy for all that being a Lapp meant if you weren’t one of them. For the Amish, everyone not within the Amish fold is ‘English’ no matter the surname. A small son tugged at his father’s suspenders.
I glanced around the large open-concept room, the kitchen with its table set for six with fine bone china, the solid oak cupboards. I peeked around a corner into the large living room, its sofa and a few hard backed chairs lining the wall. There were no rugs, no magazines, no books and no toys. The hardwood floors shone.
David’s wife, Rebecca, said, “Welcome. Please find yourself a place at our table.” I smiled at the three daughters hovering in the background; one fingering the tie of her white cap. Another boy stood by the stove. They smiled back. Five children and the house so quiet and peaceful.
“Your house is beautiful. It’s so big,” I said, hoping I hadn’t been too forward. But I knew that most visitors are interested in the Amish, that they are Lancaster County’s greatest tourist attraction and also that David and Rebecca had opened their home to our curious eyes.
“I built it myself,” David said with obvious pride. “Except for the plumbing, dry walling, wiring and kitchen cabinets. Other Amish men helped me with those. We use gas instead of electricity, though, and the phone is in the barn.”
A barefoot daughter ran in the front door and over to the fridge with a bag of vegetables from the garden. Rebecca looked at the fridge. “Yes, everything is run by gas, the fridge, the stove, even the lights and my sewing machine.”
Bob, my husband, and I had gone to Pennsylvania on a whim, had found a resort near Treasure Lake Du Bois. “We can canoe and hike there,” he had said. “The resort is on 9 000 acres of forest.” I packed my hiking poles and boots.
At check in, the receptionist said, “Hiking trails? Well, you can check out the state parks and national forests. There aren’t any trails here.” So we sat outside that first night, flipping the pages of guide books, listening to the crack of golf balls on trees at the deck’s edge.
Out of sorts, we dropped by the marina the next morning. In my mind’s eye, I saw water lapping the shores of lakes at home in Ontario. “Where’s the nearest place to hike around here?” I asked Damian, the marina employee as we dragged our canoe into the water.
“Well, a state park about an hour’s drive. But, you’ve got to watch for ticks. They carry Lyme’s Disease.” Geez, I thought, remembering the tick bite and bull’s eye rash I’d gotten in the Niagara Peninsula two years earlier.
We paddled for an hour threading our way through the wakes of powerful motor boats. Large homes lined the shores with no spare land in between for a quick stop. Our picnic lunch sat in the bottom of the canoe. That night we walked on asphalt golf cart trails, watching the rays of the setting sun slant across the greens.
“Let’s go to the Lapp Valley Farm today,” Bob said the next morning. “It’s only three hours from here in Lancaster County. Maybe we can find out who your ancestors are.” Later that day, the guide at the Mennonite Visitor Center in Lancaster City had said, “There are lots of Lapps around here. They’re mostly Amish. Your best bet is the archives at National Mennonite Historical Society.”
And so, while Bob read a book in a nearby Starbucks, I lost myself in names, charts, photos and a labyrinth of people with names like Jeremiah, Mary, Samuel, Jacob, Anna, Rudolph.
Then eureka! Three hours later, I found the records of the Pink Ship Mary and the signature of my paternal great, great, great, great, great grandfather, Johannes Lap (the spelling of our name has changed) who arrived in Philadelphia in 1733 from what is now Germany. He was a Quaker. But until the mid 1800s or so the Lapps had switched back and forth between Amish and Mennonite. What a surreal discovery.
That night, Dolores the owner of Richmond House B & B in New Holland had said, “Would you like have dinner in an Amish home tonight?” Would we! And so that is how we found ourselves with David and Rebecca Zoot and their five children. I was on my best behaviour. “Would someone say grace, please?” Rebecca asked.
I’m usually the first to volunteer for things. But I knew that a long lapsed Catholic, even one with a good memory of the “Hail Mary” wouldn’t go over well in this home. During another guest’s long and careful grace, I realized I was amongst believers and better watch myself.
For the next hour and a half, our dinner was served and plates cleared away like a well choreographed drama. The eldest daughter placed a platter piled high with sausages onto the table followed by a large plate of chicken. The sausages melted in my mouth.
“They’re baked for three hours in the oven with pineapple juice, ginger ale, ketchup, mustard, vinegar and brown sugar,” Rebecca said. “And the chicken is coated with corn flakes, range dressing and parmesan cheese.” The food tasted almost loved and cared for.
We passed around homemade whole wheat bread, jam and peanut butter, a huge bowl of broccoli and cabbage salad, potatoes as smooth as silk whipped with browned butter and a large platter of beans. “They’re fresh from the garden,” Rebecca said, her arms around two of her daughters. I glanced over to the kitchen sink where David was washing dishes, sharing a joke with his middle daughter.
Rebecca noticed me watching David. “He’s my Maytag,” she said laughing. Rebecca was lovely. The real deal, with a genuine smile that lit up the room. This family is perfect I thought. The house is perfect, the gardens are perfect. This is an Amish version of “The Truman Story.”
The cuckoo clock chimed in the living room. “It was a wedding gift,” David said, as one of the young boys, his hair flopping, sprinted from the kitchen, jumped onto a chair and changed the song. “We have some music even for Christmas,” he said.
“For dessert we have raspberry crumble or chocolate brownies. You can choose or try a little of each.” Rebecca said while the girls served and she and David replaced the main course dishes in the cupboard. “This set of china was my wedding gift from David,” she said turning over one of the plates to show us the gold handwritten inscription of their names on each plate. We’ve only broken one so far!
“How do you do all this? Rebecca, I asked.
“The girls help,” she said. “We started to prepare this meal around noon today. There is a Bible school of forty coming this weekend. The community helps too.” I felt nostalgia and some sadness. What would our world be if we lived like the Zoots with obvious love and affection and a tangible community that wasn’t on Facebook? I asked myself.
“The girls would like to sing a song for you,” Rebecca said. I looked over at David leaning against the sink, the younger boy in his arms. Rebecca stood holding hands with their other son. The girls, stood in front of us, a small choir with their long mauve dresses and black aprons, their hair parted in the middle and tucked under their caps. The boys joined in when they could.
“There'll be no Band-aids in Heaven,
No emergency medical care,
There’ll be no skinned knees,
No stings from the bees,
They'll be no Band-aids up there.”
No emergency medical care,
There’ll be no skinned knees,
No stings from the bees,
They'll be no Band-aids up there.”
The girls smiled shyly at our applause. “You’re welcome to visit the barn. We have a new pony and a three week old goat.” Rebecca said and the kids bolted out the door to barn, happy to be released, I suppose.
I walked into the barn, which was perfect too, of course. You could have eaten from the floor. Even the animals looked polished. The eldest daughter, Sarah, stood next to me. “May I see inside your buggy?” I asked. “Sure,” she said walking over to the grey closed-in carriage.
“Do you get cold in the winter? I asked, standing next to the waist high steel-rimmed wheels. “Oh no,” she said. “There are seven of us and we keep each other warm. See how soft the seats are. Here are the holes where the horse’s reins come in through the front.” She raised the window.
“It all looks like new.” I said.
“New?” she laughed. “Hardly. It’s near done. My Dad’s had this buggy since he was sixteen.”
I thanked Sarah, patted one of the horses and walked over to our car feeling transformed somehow by this gracious, gentle family and their Amish ways.
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