Free Landchester Amish Love: Ruth (Amish Romance) (Landchester Amish Love Series Book 2) by Esther Weaver Page A

what she had to say. And it hadn’t been boys that had done that, ever.
    Really, it hadn’t been many people who had shown the initiative and sought Ruth out. It had really only been Katie, for the most part.
    Katie! Well, that was the sort of person she should be, wasn’t it? If she wanted to be noticed, and she wanted boys to see her, and for her to catch their attention, then she should really be more like Katie. Katie could talk to anyone, and often did. Half the time Ruth didn’t know if Katie kept track of where conversations started. They always ended somewhere entirely different with her. But she made new friends like Sarah had made dolls: happily and easily.
    The thought of her schweschder reminded Ruth of the doll she had been working on. She gingerly picked it up from the ground and looked at it. She must get better at speaking to people, rather than only always listening to them, or she must learn to be happy with dolls. It was one or the other, it seemed.
    Staring at the doll, Ruth found she had no easy answer. Both seemed impossible tasks to her. But the thing about impossible tasks is that you find them less impossible when you begin trying to do them. So Ruth worked on the doll, and resolved to ask Sarah what she could do to begin to be more like her, and less like her reserved, attentive self.
    As she worked on the doll, she pricked her finger again. This was not going to be easy.

Chapter 2
    That afternoon, while Ruth was still struggling with the doll, she heard a knock on the workshop door.
    Had she been a person of greater acquaintance, she might have wondered who it was. But her familye was all out visiting  Leah and George, who had just been married, and would need much advice in their life together, so there was only one person it could be.
    “Come in, Katie!” Ruth called out without standing up.
    She looked at the door and saw Katie’s face appear comically around it. Katie stuck out her tongue, when she saw Ruth was indeed looking at her, and Ruth laughed.
    Which made her prick herself again.
    “Ow!” she cried out, and Katie rushed to her, picking up her hand and rubbing it between her own hands.
    “ Ach , I didn’t know that making dolls was such a danger!” Katie said, and Ruth only opened her eyes wide in agreement.
    Katie regarded her for a moment. She knew her friend, and knew her well.
    “I was going to come visit you, I thought, and see how you were doing. But it doesn’t look like you need a visit.”
    Ruth was concerned.
    “ Nee, Katie. I do need a visit. Very much! You don’t understand what today has been like.”
    Katie gently neatened the hair that had come undone and now lay across Ruth’s forehead, a playful smile on her lips.
    “And you don’t understand me ,” she said. “You don’t need a visit; you need an escape.”
    Ruth was relieved. She didn’t take much encouragement to leave the hated doll on the workbench, and follow Katie out to the fields.
    They’d always gone walking just here. Since they were kinder , it had been their place. They had a route they took through the fields, and there was comfort in it always being just so and just the same. They wanted the seasons come and go together, and saw year over year how the farmers rotated their crops. They each had a season they liked best. Katie liked the summer, when all the crops were fully grown and out in the open.
    But Ruth had always liked the winter. It was cold, and they had to bundle up if they wanted to go walking, and they couldn’t even go at all if the snow was too high. But Ruth had always liked the sense that the plants were all just hiding, waiting to come out. And it had always been a reminder to her, prone to negativity as she knew herself to be, that however impossible things looked, they were always just a few months from turning around. How bleak the winter must seem to a plant, who doesn’t know how the world will change!
    Today, though, Ruth was not prone to the introspection