The Reindeer Keeper

  The other day I stopped at an Amish farm I’d driven by many times. It had nothing to do with their roadside stand. It was because an Amish woman at another roadside stand told me that one of the three Amish men on their local school board lived there. She told me this after I voiced my curiosity about Amish schools. I explained I liked to write stories. Some for children. Some for adults. I told her I had an idea for a new storyline which included an Amish community. A particular character was the Amish teacher. I asked her if it would be possible for me to visit an Amish school. That’s when she told me about that Amish farm where that Amish man on the school board lived. I never did tell her I had been wanting to visit an Amish school for years. New storyline or not. So, the other day when I finally stopped at that Amish farm, the Amish man on the school board was home. He was more than kind. A half hour later I was parking my car off the road, in front of the Amish school I had...

When I was growing up I was lucky to have a mother and a grandmother who bought me books that I fell in love with and remain favorites to this day. Of course there was no internet to go to when buying the books. Instead there was a little bookstore in our downtown. Sometimes I'd get to go there with my mother. I'd be excited when walking through the door and seeing all the books on display. The smell of the books, of the type on the pages, was magical. My grandmother bought me books written by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I not only read those books. I devoured them. From the little house in the woods where Laura lived with her family to the house  on the prairie to the house on the banks of Plum Creek, I was with Laura and her family wherever they went. I shivered in fear when wolves would howl or grasshoppers brought about a plague or fierce blizzards buried them in snow. I imagined playing with dolls made of cornstalks in the attic with Laura and Mary. I loved summer planti...

I'm not sure if this is the one-room schoolhouse my mother and a few of her sisters attended before it was closed and they went into the nearby city to school and I don't know how old they were when they made the switch. I do know they graduated from the Catholic high school which has since been torn down and is now the sight of the local fire department. The one-room schoolhouse they attended was up the road from where they lived-down a side road just as it curved by a bunch of maples. The creek that ran behind their farmhouse ran behind the school as well. The school is long gone but the maples are still there. Sometimes I go down that old country road. I slow down before that turn; imagining exactly where that school sat and imagining my mother and her sisters walking along that very road. If this is the school-then this is where my parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents bought the desks, books, and chalkboards for me and my cousins for our chicken coop clubhouse...