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.