I was itching to write something..so i thought i would write about what it was like to grow up surrounded by old order
Mennonites.
My family moved to Scottsville, Kentucky when my mom was about 6 months pregnant with me. They bought an old Mennonite farm. The house had no electricity and no plumbing. When the wind blew hard enough the windows would rattle in their frames.The entire farm was overgrown with a plant that's called "pig weed",obnoxious stuff!! Anyway, I was born 3 months after my family moved into the house in Ky. The house was remodeled somewhat, they put in plumbing as soon as they bought it. We never had electricity there and I remember the Friday ritual of cleaning those horrible black, smoky oil lamp chimneys. It sure was one special day when we had solar installed and lo and behold, we could flip a switch and light! Ahh, that's when you really enjoy simple pleasures like that.
We had an organic farm. We grew all of our food organically, farmed it with Belgian horses and sold the produce to the local Mennonite produce markets, who in turn sold the produce at the markets throughout the community or were shipped to stores in the neighboring towns and cities. To take the produce to the market we would use a dirt road that cut through a Mennonite neighbor's farm. We had to go through a creek with our load of watermelons, cantaloupe, pumpkins, or whatever the load was in the steel wheeled produce/hay wagon. You really had to have a good hold or you'd go up in the air and boy it didn't feel good when you came back down! Ouch!
I never had a real fear of horses because I grew up around big ones. Most of our horses were such big babies. Belgians are pretty broad, and my 6 yr old legs weren't that long, so when I would ride them, my legs would practically stick straight out, and to stay on I had to have a good hand hold in their manes. It sure was fun to go riding down the road , or better yet, guide one of them while dad plowed the garden.
When I was born my sisters where 14 and 12. Yup, there was a pretty good sized gap! I was a pretty energetic, inquisitive toddler and man was it fun to get into my sister's or anyone else's stuff. For about the first 5 yrs of my life there where no doors in the bedrooms, just blankets, and so no way to keep me out! Pretty early on in my life my sisters or any of the other teenagers staying with my family at the time had come up with my nickname and a name for my raids. I was dubbed Pooh and my raids-"Pooh Raids". Once my brother Seth was old enough, he was usually my partner in toddler crimes. One time my sister Alina had just put a new role of film in her camera, I thought it would be pretty cool to finally get to use that camera. It was always off limits to me, So with my Seth, or anything that caught my interest as my model ,I proceeded to snap picture after picture after picture.The only catch... my crime was caught on film. Alina yelled "Pooh Raid" at the top of her lungs when she got her pictures developed.
My brother Seth was born when I was a little over two, from the start he was "my baby". As I've already mentioned, he was my accomplice in crime, my buddy, and for sure my best friend! When he was a toddler, he constantly had the rest of my family in a panic. He loved escaping to the creek!If someone's back was turned, off he'd go through the pastures,and down to the creek. Usually, he was caught before he reached the creek though. I could never understand why on earth it was so all fired important to stop him though, or why everyone would get so excited when he vanished. Now I do..
My close friends from babyhood were my Mennonite neighbors, Darla and Melissa Martin. I was sandwiched in between them in age and boy did we have fun together! From our "mailbox" by the creek, a crack in a rock where we would put little notes for each other, to playing tag in Mr. Martins field corn..You could say I had a very unique experience growing up there. By the way, anyone who has never tasted cane has really missed out! I'ts in the sugar cane family and sorghum molasses is made out of the cane. One of our favorite things to do was to get to ride along in the wagon with Mr. Martin and Darla and Melissa's older brothers to the cane fields and then sit in the bottom of the wagon munching on cane until we were sick of it! We would also go and get sugar baby watermelons and drop them from the high platform in one of the sheds, which broke them, and then we would eat the heart out of the watermelons-the best part!!-.In case your wondering, we did do other things other then eat. We'd spend hours picking cukes, to make into pickles or sell them, tomatoes, blueberries, strawberries, etc. and of course not in that order..I think they come into season the other way around..
Matthew Klein was basically like a brother to me, He came to live with my family when he was 16, the year I was born. He was the most interesting person to be with for a toddler ( we were on the same level a lot of the times!) although sometimes he made me mad enough to want to smack him. he would hide in trees and taunt me, drag me through the snow, or walk around in a sleeping bag and growl at Seth and I until we were crouching and quivering on the couch.
He was only one of the many teenagers that lived with my family over the space of about 4-5 yrs. Joel Baker suffered at the hands of my unmerciful sisters .Give them some rotten tomatoes and boy he came in looking like rotten tomato sauce..but I guess he did lob the first tomato. I won't go into the story of how he was left hanging in a tree by his suspenders.
When the weather was hot and sticky and you sure didn't want to be outside..well that's when it was time for haying! Haying, that dreaded word when it came to the farmers, and for Seth and I the magical word! Haying meant unending amounts of lemonade and riding in the hay wagons high above the ground in the hay! Sometimes..I even got to drive, and that plus lemonade equaled a pretty awesome day for me! My sister Sarah usually drove though and Alina, Dad, and an older Mennonite man, Marvin, would pitch the hay from the hay loader into the wagon so it would be a more even load, then onto the barn we went and we would use the hay fork to unload the hay into the high hay loft! Man was it fun once the hay loft was full of hay and you could go rolling from the top to the bottom! And of course I cant forget our attempts at hay tunneling..those usually didn't turn out to well and I would come up coughing from all of the dust. But it was still fun!
When thrashing time came around some English(that's what the Mennonite people call outsiders, and its stuck with me..)people with a steam engine thrashing set up would come to our farm and thrash the wheat. They couldn't go to the Mennonite farms because anything with an engine(including steam engines) are against their beliefs..So they came to our farm. Usually some of the different Mennonite men ended up coming over to "help" and somehow some of their wheat ended up getting thrashed also.. It was always a fun day filled with friends and neighbors, good food and work!
In the winter we would make maple syrup. On our farm there was a sugar shed(where you can cook maple sap down). We had a sugar bush on our farm and we would tap them every year and go around in the wagons collecting the buckets of sap. It was always cold, of course, because it was usually around January. We would make maple syrup with the Shirks, a neighboring Mennonite family. We would make a couple of gallons of syrup per family, and it sure tasted good on pancakes!
The Mennonites love children and they were always very affectionate towards Seth and I. The Mennonite guys used to say I had "Tease Me" written on my forehead, and strangely that seems to still be printed in bold letters on my forehead to this day. We had a special place in that community. Not very many "English people" have had that close of contact with an old order community like them. I had a very unique childhood and I'll always treasure those memories!
