He paused. “Of course, I miss Edna every day.”
I reached over and patted his arm. His wife had passed away three years ago. I’d sent a card, and Uncle Seth had written a kind note in return. The two had been married for fifty-four years.
As Uncle Seth turned into Mammi’s driveway, the lights from the pickup illuminated the two-story farmhouse and then the white barn. My heart swelled with the feeling of home.
Mammi, bundled in a thick sweater, greeted us at the back door. As Uncle Seth headed up to my room with my bag, Mammi put her hands on both of my shoulders and locked her eyes on mine. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said.
Overcome with emotion, I simply nodded.
“Are you hungry?”
I shook my head.
“Exhausted?”
I nodded again.
“Go on up to bed,” she said. “Everything is ready for you.”
“Denki,” I said. “We’ll talk in the morning.” I exhaled, relaxing a little for the first time in almost a week.
The farmhouse smelled just the way it had when I was a girl, like coffee and cinnamon. Wood and lavender. Love and comfort.
Uncle Seth came down the staircase, and after thanking him profusely, I went up, crawling into my childhood bed with my coat still on. Even with that, it was cold. In my tired stupor, I remembered that the bedrooms in Amish homes had no source of heat. I also remembered that I’d only ever visited Indiana in the summer.
I shivered until I finally warmed enough to fall asleep.
PERHAPS I DREAMED about my childhood, because when I awoke—on what should have been my wedding day—my thoughts weren’t on Ryan. They were on my parents.
My father, James Jonathan Mast Jr., left the Amish as an eighteen-year-old. He loved the land, farming, and his family. But he couldn’t, as much as he tried to force himself, join the church. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in God. It was the many rules that he couldn’t accept.
One warm spring night in 1989, he left a note to his parents in the middle of the big oak table, the edge of the paper tucked under the sugar bowl. He aimed west and finally, as the sun rose, hitched a ride. Once a week he’d send a postcard to his parents, trying to save them as much worry as possible.
First, he worked on a dairy farm in Illinois and then, in the fall, headed west again. He found a job operating a ski lift in Colorado. The next spring, just after he turned nineteen, he headed to Northern California. He took a job working on a cattle ranch outside of Grass Valley, a town of twelve thousand people, located between Sacramento and Donner’s Pass.
My mother worked in the area on an organic vegetable farm with some of her girlfriends. She and Dad met at a farmers’ market that August, and they both swore it was love at first sight. She was all of nineteen and, of course, more worldly-wise than Dad. But right up until the end of her days, she’d had a sort of childlike innocence to her. Somehow my mother managed to always live in the moment, finding joy in even the mundane.
“Savannah.” Mammi’s low voice was followed by a quiet knock on my door. “Breakfast is ready.”
Although awake, I finally opened my eyes to the gray morning light coming through the east-facing windows.
“Be down in a minute,” I said.
“The kitchen is warm . . .” Mammi’s voice trailed off.
The room, my room, had been my father’s. It was furnished as simply as every bedroom in the house, with a bed, a bureau, and pegs on the wall to hang clothing.
The first time Dad put me on a plane for Indiana, I was six. Mom’s parents had divorced when she was little, and she never had much of a relationship with her father, who’d moved to Houston. And, according to her, her mother wasn’t the “grandma type.”
All I had were Dad’s stories, but I was pretty sure Mammi Mast was the grandma type. She cooked and baked and gardened and quilted. And at the time, because my grandfather had died the year before, she also managed the farm, leasing out most of the land and hiring a farmhand to do the rest.
Mom had had fifteen babies to deliver that summer, and Dad was working fourteen-hour days on the ranch. I often accompanied both of them to work, and I could have easily done that all through the summer. But instead I asked to go see my Mammi in Indiana. So Dad left a message for his mother, and she called back and said, “I’d like to have Savannah visit.”
Looking back, it seems awfully trusting of Mom to let me go stay with a woman she’d never met. She must have trusted that Dad wouldn’t send me if I wouldn’t be safe. He was overprotective, to say the least, but he never had qualms about my visiting Mammi.
There may have been another reason too. All in all, we were a happy little family, but I sensed tension between my parents from time to time. Now, as an adult, I guessed Dad probably didn’t talk much about his feelings and that Mom, who was the most emotionally honest person I’ve ever met, was probably frustrated with him. And perhaps hurt. Looking back, I hope it was good for them to have those weeks without me during the summer. I doubted that Dad opened up more, but at least they didn’t have to juggle me along with their jobs. At least they had a little bit of time for just the two of them.
That first summer, Uncle Seth picked me up at the tiny South Bend airport and dropped me off at the Mast family farm. That began an annual tradition, which continued every summer until I was fifteen. After that, I started officially working as Mom’s assistant and began an apprenticeship, sure I wanted
