Of course, that had been back when we still lived in Germany. I couldn’t remember moving out of our house in Heidelberg or the long airplane ride to the States, but I remembered my mother calling her parents once we were settled into our new home in Maryland to tell them we had returned from overseas at last. I remembered that conversation well, remembered hearing her say that we wanted to come for a visit. But then after she hung up the phone, she just cried for a long time. And that visit never happened. I never even met my grandparents, in fact, until the day of the funeral, the day they took me home and my old life came to an end and my new one began.
“My mother?” I said finally, turning to Rachel. “She was smart and funny and nice and everybody liked her.” Glancing her way, I couldn’t help but add, “She wasn’t Amish, you know. Neither is my dad.”
I could still see Rachel’s face in that moment, the hurt in her big blue eyes. I could still feel the shame burning my cheeks, shame at the way I had said the word “Amish,” as though it was something to be disdained, as though I wasn’t wearing Amish clothes myself or living an Amish life, day after day, in my grandparents’ Amish home.
Once again she had walked away without a word. That was on a Friday, and I felt bad all weekend long about what I’d said. When I saw her again that Monday at school, I was ready to apologize. But before I could, she simply came up to me and gestured across the playground toward the swings. We ran there together, and that time we didn’t just hang still but instead tried to get ourselves going. By pushing off with our feet and pumping our legs, over and over—leaning back, stretching out, leaning forward, curling under—we eventually went so high we were nearly perpendicular to the ground.
“We’re going to swing to the moon!” she cried.
“We’re going to swing to the sun!” I responded.
“We’re going to swing all the way to heaven!” she said. “All the way up to your mother!”
I glanced at her, but she wasn’t making fun. She wasn’t even pretending, really. She was just trying to make me feel better, to say something kind. That was the first I became aware of Rachel’s gift for compassion.
“All the way up to heaven,” I agreed, and in the look we shared as we soared toward the sky, I knew all would be well between us from that moment forward.
THREE
After our tasks at the Bowmans’ were done, Jake and I had just enough time to go home to get cleaned up and dressed before coming back for the wedding. In our district, weddings were always held on Tuesdays and Thursdays from October to December. That seemed like a lot of time to fit all of them in, but in densely populated Lancaster County, getting that many young couples married off in such a short amount of time was nearly impossible. Jake had pulled out a calendar once and done the math, and those Tuesdays and Thursdays each fall added up to a total of less than thirty possible days per year on which to hold a wedding. For the people in our district, that meant running like crazy for three months, attending at least one or two weddings per week and struggling to decide between the numerous options that inevitably popped up. Having been through seventeen such seasons myself since coming to live with my grandparents, I’d seen many a couple take their marriage vows. But I was definitely more aware of the details at Anna and Tobias’s wedding ceremony than I had been at any of those in the past.
During the long service I sat with the men as usual, but my gaze kept wandering over to where Rachel sat on the women’s side, in the front row. Looking at her, I pondered the notion that this was most likely my last wedding season as a bachelor. If she and I became engaged soon, as everyone expected us to, then Jake was right. Next fall, I would be a groom.
For that to happen, though, I would also need to be a baptized member of the Amish church. While I embraced that idea in theory, in reality I wasn’t so sure. That would mean no more dawns spent gazing into my mother’s pond and wondering what was on the other side, no more sunsets spent thinking of Rachel and wondering if this really was the life I wanted. The time for wondering would be over. The time for commitment would begin.
Rachel had been done with her wondering a few years ago, taking her baptismal vows when she was nineteen. She’d had her rumspringa like the rest of us, but over time she had worked through all her questions and doubts about becoming Amish and decided to make that commitment for life. While my period of rumpspringa continued to drag on, she had slowly outgrown the youth gatherings and lost the itch to see movies or own a cell phone or wear Englisch clothing. When I was eighteen and wanted to get a driver’s license, she helped me study for the written test, but she had no desire to get one of her own. She never made me feel silly or sinful for wanting it, but she did ask me what was the draw in having something that, as an Amish man, I would never use. I’d told her I wanted to see what it was like to drive a motor vehicle, not just sit in one while someone else drove.