The Amish Midwife
woman and a girl, both wearing dresses out of the same blue material, black aprons, and white bonnets, bent low in a garden plot. Two barefoot toddlers played in the grass. As the scene went by, a line full of clothes flapped in the breeze, the white house and barn both backdrops to the colorful display. Soon I was driving forty miles an hour with a line of cars behind me. The farms were immaculate. Tidy fields. Trimmed lawns that looked robust even in the early spring. Gardens newly planted or being planted. White houses and barns. Clothesline after clothesline, usually strung by sturdy pulleys from the back porch to the barn, of solid-color shirts and dresses in maroon, forest green, and blue. And black pants, aprons, and white bonnets. It dawned on me it was Monday. Wash day. Tuesday was ironing and gardening. Wednesday was sewing and Thursday market day. Friday was cleaning, Saturday baking, and Sunday the day of rest. It was all spelled out in the song “Here We Go Around the Mulberry Bush,” which I use to chant. I was seven before I realized Mama ran our house on the same schedule.
    The matching clothes, immaculate farms, and whitewashed houses and barns had a stylized appeal. I liked things uniform. It appealed to, as James would say, my sterile sense of decor. But none of it was sterile. It was all very much alive. The people. The scents wafting through my open window. The vibrant colors snapping on the lines. It was orderly and patterned and obviously it all had a purpose.
    Ahead, along the busy road, a group of children walked, swinging black lunch pails that looked like what Dad used to take out to the orchard when he was too busy to come in for lunch. Two girls skipped. A boy kicked a rock. The car behind me honked. My speed had dropped to thirty. I accelerated before a corner, and then this time I did slam on my brakes. Ahead, in the middle of the lane, was a black buggy with a gray roof and an orange caution triangle on the back. Now I had an excuse to go slow.
    I passed a one-room school where a young woman swept the porch. Walking ahead was a mother holding a young child’s hand with a baby on her hip. As I passed them, I saw a boy on a bicycle-like scooter weaving along the shoulder of the road. The car behind me passed my rentaland the carriage, which, surprisingly, clipped along at twenty-five miles an hour. Ahead was a straight stretch, so I passed the carriage too, glancing over my shoulder. A woman drove it, the strings of her heart-shaped bonnet blowing away from her face. I looked in my rearview mirror. The horse was beyond beautiful. It moved like a racehorse, its lean muscles rippling with graceful determination.
    A few minutes later I was in the town of Strasburg—that or I’d time-warped to 1776. I half expected to see George Washington walk out of one of the brick houses. The entire town looked like a Federalist colony with building after building of red brick with white trim and black shutters. At the crossroads in the middle of town, an Amish carriage waited for the traffic signal to change. Ahead a gaggle of Amish girls stood on the sidewalk. It was hard for me to tell, but they looked as if they were fifteen or so. They had gathered around a boy with a tray in his hand. The sign on the shop above the teenagers read “Pretzels.” There were several other shops in the little downtown district. The village was obviously a tourist draw.
    A few miles out of town, the GPS instructed me to turn left onto a one-lane country road. Green pastures rolled up the sloping hillside. A flock of sheep dotted one side. A McMansion topped the hill to the left. I sighed. Obviously not everyone in these parts was Amish. But next was an Amish farm. A woman stood on the back porch, working the pulley to bring in the line of clothes.
    I maneuvered a turn in the road and immediately faced a covered bridge. I eased the car over it, holding my breath as I hoped it would hold, hoped the GPS wasn’t sending me on

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