The first time I met an Amish person I was a teenager. It was 1985, and my family had recently moved back to Ohio from a stint in the United Arab Emirates. Life overseas had given me a hunger to know about other cultures, and also the Harrison Ford movie Witness had just come out. So when my family encountered a bearded, Abraham-Lincoln figure selling baked goods from a buggy, I was a little seduced by the tableau of simplicity that he presented. Then the man reached into a Coleman cooler for a block of Swiss cheese. That image has never left me. The fiberglass food safe with its brightâ??green lid seemed so out of place.
The Amish, apparently, were more complicated than I thought.
Read Full Article »