Wednesday, March 13, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Country Salvage
Thus says the Lord: in a time of favor I answer you, on the day of salvation I help you, and I have kept you and given you as a covenant to the people, to restore the land and allot the desolate heritages.
We are going to spend time today in our favorite store, a longtime presence in the Amish community around Arcola, Illinois. It has had other names, but now it’s just called Country Salvage. We’ll share a meal with our friends Jim and Elaine afterward, and try to get home before dark.
We drive about 45 minutes to get to Country Salvage. It’s surrounded by other fine shops run by Amish families – Beachey’s Bulk Foods, Dutch Valley Meats, and Family Health Foods are three of our favorites. Until we moved mostly to Austin, we got our raw milk and cheese, garden vegetables and eggs from our favorite Amish farmer-pastor a couple miles south of Country Salvage. Our conversations were always worth the price of admission.
Our friends, who live in Camargo, moved from eastern Ohio to Champaign, and then down into the Amish world. Jim is a woodworker and retired therapist, Elaine is an artist and retired dentist. They plant plenty of strawberry plants in the spring, along with whatever else they can get their hands on.
Along the ways they shall find pasture, on every bare height shall their pastures be. They shall not hunger or thirst.
Margaret and I both milked cows in our childhoods. Margaret reads seed catalogs and plants a garden every spring in Urbana, and keeps up a kitchen herb garden on our Austin patio. When I turn off our car engine on the country roads around Arcola, my body relaxes into the silence, my mind rests and I hear simple sounds – birds singing, wind blowing, and the clip-clop of a horse pulling a carriage up there just along the highway.
Accidents occasionally happen. Cars and horses use the same thoroughfares. The Country Salvage parking lot keeps up two areas, one for cars and one for horses, carriages and their passengers. But the collisions are very rare. Surely most all of us who live in faster places cherish the sweet stillness that comes along with our visits to the edge of this strange and peaceful older way of life. Surely our hearts swell with respect and appreciation, even if we don’t choose to live there or even understand much about the sinews of Amish life.
I will cut a road through all my mountains, and make my highways level. Sing out, O heavens, and rejoice, O earth, break forth into song, you mountains.
Before she died Mom read for hours each day. She loved Emily Dickinson’s poetry, as well as anything she could find about spies before and after World War II. But maybe even more satisfying for her were the books by Beverly Lewis, born in Amish country and still writing about it 80 books later. Mom loved to visit the world around Arthur and Arcola.
Two years ago we met Chris and Melissa’s family at Country Salvage for a shopping spree before Christmas. We drew names and spent $20 each buying Secret Santa gifts. Then we headed north to Urbana to surprise each other before the rest of our Christmas celebration. Chris got me black licorice and a bunch of other goodies. $20 worth at Country Salvage, $50 worth anywhere else.
Can a mother forget her infant, be without tenderness for the child of her womb? Even should she forget, I will never forget you.
I am awed by our overlapping lives. Our grandparents were born in the 19th century, and lived through the Great War. Mom and Dad were born in 1922, lived through the Great Depression and World War II. Margaret and I were born in 1949 and lived through the Korean Conflict and Vietnam War. Our kids were born in 1980, 1982 and 1986. They have lived through the wars in Iraq and the 9/11 bombings of NYC’s Twin Towers, as well as the recession of 2008. Our grandchildren – Jack in 2009, Aly in 2012, Miles in 2016 and Jasper in 2019. What wars and rumors of wars will they live through?
And of course there are all those other wars, and famines, and economic catastrophes in the rest of the world. The USA has its own troubles, but not so much as many other parts of the world. We are all part, however, of the US, the “us” that makes up the Community of the World, the created children one and all that God knows and loves. And loves and knows. And knows and loves.
These thoughts are easier to come by in the world around Arcola. Thank heaven for the Amish.
I do not seek my own will, but the will of the one who sent me.
(Isaiah 49, Psalm 145, John 11, John 5)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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