Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Far From Home

 

Quick, write something, anything! My resolve to write isn't just slipping away, it's gone.

The Amish are industrious folk, in my experience. We do quite a bit for the Amish down in Davies County, as I've mentioned before. There's this one guy lives outside of Odon, Etham Wagler. I don't how many pies he's got his fingers in but I know that he farms, raises pigs and makes things out of scrap fiberglass; fencing, livestock feeders and I don't know what-all. It's really nice stuff too. You see the final product and you'd never guess it was pieced together from scrap.

The scrap is where I come in. We haul it from some company out in Pennsylvania, maybe 6 to 10 time a year. He goes through it! His spread isn't the kind of place you'd want to take a sleeper cab so the over the road drivers drop it on our yard and I, or another of our day drivers delivers. I remember being down at his place once with a trainee. I said, “This is the kind of stuff that you don't get to do with a big company.”

So I was down in Odon the other day, delivering some lumber to Stoll's Building Materials, another good Amish name. I used to go through town to get to Stoll's but Etham once had me weigh his load at the grain bin, which is right across the street from Stoll's. I realized it's a lot easier to get in that way, from the back.

I turned onto the road that passes the Wagler estate, by the old one room school house, and slowed up, not that I was going fast in the first place. There were a couple of pick ups with trailers ahead of me with their flashers on, taking up most of the narrow roadway. One had a backhoe on the back, the other some drainage pipe. As I eased around them I thought, “Huh, this is Etham's place.” Then sure enough I saw them in the field. I saw his dad first, the elder Mr. Wagler, he waved at me, and I waved back, then I saw Etham. He spread his arms as if to say WTF, so I did the same and he smiled.

I know it's just a small thing, but it makes me feel as though I belong somehow.