The Amish

One time my friends Tucker, Jerry, and I wanted to go on a hike and it happened to be that Tucker has a mountain behind his house. So we headed out to go hike up the mountain that we had done over 20 times, and we got to the top and relaxed. We brought food, so we ate and just messed around at the top for about a hour until we felt ready to go. We started heading down the mountain, as we were about to be at the bottom, we always hit this intersection and we always went straight, but going to the right went to the road.

So we decided that we wanted to see what was to the left, so we started walking down that way. We walked about 5 minutes until we hit a clearing. In that clearing, we found a house with a barn and about 25 people outside. Immediately, we recognized them as Amish, just by the way they were dressed. Amish, in case you don’t know, is a group of people that are a part of a society with a strict code due to there religion. They don’t use electricity. We sat there for a couple minutes watching until someone saw us, and it was an older gentlemen about mid 40’s. He called us over. At first, we were hesitant, but we decided “why not?”

We walked over and he was standing with a women that was churning butter and asked us “Have you boy’s ever made real butter?” We told him “No.” And he asked us “Would you like to learn?” And we said, “Yes”. For about a hour Tucker, Jerry, and I made butter, and at the end of it the Amish man gave us each a jar and we filled it up with butter. After that, we left and went back to Tucker’s house and we all just laughed at how funny and random that was. To this day, we still bring that up and we laugh about it every single time we talk about it. I think the importance of laughter in this story is how it shouldn’t really be laughed at because it was really not that good of a decision to go to the farm, but it all turned out alright.

“Myrtle Lawrence churning butter on the house porch with Sylvia Lawrence, 16 year old bride of Elvin ‘Doodle’ Lawrence, in the background” by Kheel Center, Cornell University Library is licensed under CC BY 2.0.