Visiting Amish Country

While in eastern Ohio for the Huff Family Reunion, I spent a good deal of time touring the rolling amish country hillsides with my Grammalo (my dad's mom), my parents and my aunts and uncles. 

Holmes county Ohio, the county adjacent to my grandma's hometown- Sugarcreek, has the largest Amish population in the world. My own grandma's father was Mennonite and so our family has some connection to the culture. Now, mostly, we enjoy purchasing Amish made baked goods and crafts. 

We hit up a few little stores here and there. Some were much littler than others. Our first stop was a little Amish general store, meant for the Amish to shop in themselves- as opposed to hoards of tourists. Leave it to us "shopping pros" (I learned how to shop from my grammalo and aunts.) to break into the untapped Amish stores. The store featured Dutch New Testaments, adorable canisters of school supplies for individual purchase, tiny tiny leather shoes for tiny Amish babies, and enormous stock pots. There was also a necessary aisle toward the back with a stash of white cross-your-heart brasseries and 40 styles of stiff black bonnets. I didn't venture towards the men's aisle of undergarments, I didn't think it proper.

The next shop was Miller's Bakery. This two room, clapboard store is hidden up a hill of a twisting road with hardly a sign to mark it's existence. But the place was packed with customers both Amish and  otherwise. Oh man, I wish I could have bottled the smell of this place for you. I had a raisin bar- which is really a chewy bread-y molasses cookie with raisins. My favorite. My mom and I got caught up in the back room, filled with local crafts. I love these clothespin bags. I don't have any clothespins, but what could I make one of these for? What other useful thing could it hold?

One larger store had built a business out of a petting farm in the parking lot. You could buy a waffle ice cream cone full of feed for a dollar and scatter the food amongst the goats, bunnies, horses and more. I snapped a couple shots of some cuddly animal families.

Often, when I am shopping on vacation, I focus on collecting craft ideas rather than filling my shopping basket. I hate to transport too much on the road. Besides, most things at crafty joints you could easily make for cheaper than retail. I love the felt details on this lampshade and the idea of making oversized buttons to hang as wall art. I'm not sure how I'd do it, but this plaid mirror has got to be possible to recreate in house. And how about those boot planters? Fun, right? Makes me want to find the tin man and decapitate him. (Okay, that was weird.)

Check out that beautiful lady above. That's my Grammalo. 82 years young and still climbing out onto her roof to sweep off the leaves. Sheesh. I hope I inherited a lot of her genes.

As we drove through the Amish farm country, it was notably quiet and peaceful. There were few electric posts to mar the horizon. As it was Monday, wash day, the yards were filled with lines of pastel dresses and shirts and dark pants and skirts, flapping in the wind. I admire the Amish life. They live simply and quietly always in community with others. Their "church" meets inside homes and shifts weekly. So open, so democratic. I know that even in their society there are faults and hiccups. Still, tonight, I envy their evening times. No screens to distract them from looking up at the night sky- no electric bulb in sight. The stars surely shine brighter in their country.

Huff Family Reunion 2012

My absence is due to a long weekend full of travels to eastern Ohio for a family reunion and some (maybe) restful moments away from work. I saw some familiar faces and spaces and enjoyed a great deal of fun times with my dear family. 

The recaps are going to come in installments, because (you know me) I took a bahzillion pictures and want to share a lot of it all with you. I'm starting with the Huff Family Reunion in Dover, Ohio. 

My family has been having this biennial reunion for over 20 years now. For years, we met at a hotel resort on Atwood Lake in the boonies of eastern Ohio. After some economic turns in the region, the resort changed hands and purposes and we were left to find a new host for our event. The result? We moved back "home" to Dover, where my grandpa grew up. This little town, filled with lots of german and Moravian descendants,  is the origin of the Francis Huff and Adella Portz family. We enjoyed being surrounded by our own history. 

Saturday included a tour of the family home, which was built my my great grandfather many years ago. It is still in the hands of the family that purchased it from my great grandma some 20 years ago. My family traipsed about the house poking into little corners admiring and remembering. I was too little to recall my visits to grandma's house as a toddler, but most had very specific and beautiful memories and they shared stories. 

My uncle Tim and his cousin, Kip, remembered hiding treasures in a secret door in a wooden panel. My dad didn't even know it existed! Sneaky sneaky. My 2nd cousin, Andrew recalls tossing toys down the 3 story laundry chute. I was amazed as I thought about the work my great grandfather must have put into this building. I adore the old, original hardware and his beautiful woodwork. 

The home was surrounded by beautiful gardens and yards where children have played for over a hundred years. Three generations of "Huffs" toured the family home together. What an honor to have a family that values this history.

I've always enjoyed getting together with my father's side of the family. We're fun people often with a strange sense of intelligent humor. We're kind and yet a tid bit sassy. (We don't evade the normal family dramas...)  The gang is a diverse one. You'll find, as you click through my hyperlinks on this page that we're all over the map in careers and passions. We're a melting pot of conservative and liberal, old-fashioned and modern, scientific and creative. (As I make these links, I realize we are often VERY creative.) We hail from: OH, MI, MT, CA, IL, NY, MN, GA, MA, & AZ. 

I love my family. I can't wait until next reunion. Just think how the little ones will have grown by then! And who knows what I'll be doing then...time shall tell.

The Great Get Together

On Wednesday, I spent seven hours at the great Minnesotan get together. My closest friend, Laura, and I biked across along the Mississippi, through the University of Minnesota campus, behind full buses of fair goers, and arrived sweaty and eager at the Minnesota State Fair. We went just after lunch, hoping for a respite from the evening crowds, but were greeted by thousands of other people with the same great idea. After all, it was the perfect day for the fair. A little overcast, but still bright, low 80’s with an occasional, crisp wind and the promise of a cool evening.

There is something about get-togethers of that sort— block parties, reunions, fairs— that send me back to my roots. My childhood home of south eastern Kentucky was a place where a stranger waved on every road crest. Where every man was a cousin of his neighbor and if he wasn’t, he’d treat him just the same. It was a place into which I was transplanted during the most awkward time in anyone’s life: the middle school years. I came in a “yank” at the age of 9. Fifteen years later, after simply existing with those people— an open, loving, friendly accepting crowd with a blunt tongue and a taste for both adventure and stillness— I, too, walked away a full-blooded, cousin-of-her-neighbor Kentuckian.

There was a twinge of this Kentucky feeling at the fair. Each man meandering from his own corner of the state, his bag full of tools of his own kind: film, wool carder, flask, saddle, & fanny pack. Men and women and their children tossing their arms in excitement, noshing on fried bits shoved through with sticks. Hardly a square yard to stand alone. This is the Minnesota State Fair. It is a place where llamas and geese are judged & where alfalfa and timothy seed make art. There are jangling rides, invisible dogs on leashes and plenty else to toss money at. But before the tickets are purchased it is only 6 square blocks of buildings separated by dusty roads.

Each morning, as the 4H kids brush down their horses, it begins. A family walks through the gates, then a couple, then a man carrying a dufflebag of water bottles. Each body, a tick to the turnstyle, a new citizen in the biggest and most temporary small town anyone’s ever visited. People pour like grain through a spout. The place fills up, shoulder to shoulder on some paths. You can’t help but bump someone while walking, not sure where your eye should land with so many hats baubling in the sun.

In the heat of an afternoon, it’s hard to imagine a time when the crowds will thin. But they will leave— fingers still sticky from sweet cotton fluff, salty sweat caked to their foreheads, feet pulsing tired. And as they pass the gates one last time they might not know that they won’t ever come back. The populace gathered at one day at the fair is never to be duplicated. The people will never reunite in that order, in any location. And though the buildings stay standing, it’s as though the place has vanished.

I’ve been gone from Kentucky now for 4 years. In that time, I’ve re-learned the yankee tongue and all but forgotten the broken glass trickle of a mountain stream. I love the city, but I have thoughts that it’s still not too late to return to the hills for good. I could take a job at the school where I once etched in desks and meet a thick-necked mountain boy. I could hike the hill where I grew tall and scribble in journals about the flutter of leaves before a country storm. The hills, however, were merely the setting and the work the means of my life in Appalachia. The people made the place my home. Some have died, some moved on, but most have simply replaced me with a new smile, a new hand.

I visited once, a couple years ago. I was walking down a footpath near my old house— one on which I’d like to think my feet helped pack the dirt. A women watching from her porch lifted herself out of a wicker chair to ask me “Honey, are you lost?”. I didn’t know. I didn’t think I was until she asked. It turns out, when I left Kentucky, the turnstyle ticked behind me. I will go back, but I’ll never really return to that place.