Names

My almost-daily walks are always interesting.  As I high-stepped up the Zuercher Rd hill this afternoon it was chilly and breezy.  Quite a bit different than the hot days of summer when I’d wait until evening before heading out.  Often the wind comes from a westerly direction and the wooded area beside the road blocks it until I reach the open fields just past Amish Hershberger’s lane.  Today the wind was coming out of the south east, so it was cold all the way.  Near the top of the hill is simple one-room Amish schoolhouse followed by a corn field that was still being put up in shocks today by some of the same Amish youth who just last Sunday made my day interesting with their boom boxes.   

Cresting the hill I quickened my pace and soon reached Amish driveways on both sides of the road with mailboxes for the Stutzman and Hershberger families.  The Stutzman's house is close to the road, and they often have the laundry hanging on the porch and another couple lines out close to the road.  Today the clothes flapped ecstatically in the breeze.  Towels, wash rags, shirts, dresses, barn-door pants, socks and sheets.  It suddenly hit me that, as often as I’ve seen clothes hanging there, I’ve never seen underwear.  Hmmm.  Not that it matters to me, but it makes me wonder.

The mailboxes stirred some thoughts about other long German and Swiss names we have around our little home town.  I think Neuenschwander is perhaps the lengthiest.  First time I heard it, I thought someone was kidding.  Back where I come from in Elida, Ohio, Mennonites have names like Bear, Brunk, Bucher, Crisenbery, Good, Heatwole, Hartman, Ross, Smith and Stemen, with the occasional Troyer or Yoder who had wandered in from other places.  Come to think of it, all the Mennonites around Elida wandered in from other places.  Most of them have roots in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, leaving there during and following the Civil war.  Elida has good land - black fertile soil that my agrarian ancestors loved to farm.   

I don’t regret being born at Elida.  It’s a good place to be from, but sometimes a better place to leave, and that’s what my family did when I was twelve years old.  We headed east to Wayne County when Dad was called into the ministry.  And that’s when I began hearing these strange-to-me names - names like Neuenschwander.  Fourteen letters.   More of a sentence than a name, I thought.  

Within a few years one of the pretty Neuenschwander girls from the south end of Kidron caught my eye.  We were Seniors at Central Christian High School.  It was 1970.  We were married two-and-half years later.  But I’ve always been slightly uneasy about Juanita’s motives for marrying me.  She was able to cut 10 letters from her last name.  This is more important than you might think at first glance.  This has saved her so much time signing her name that she’s been able to piece several additional quilt tops.  And she’s avoided hand-writer’s cramps and carpal tunnel.  (You’re welcome, my love.)

With the wind to my back, and 3 more miles under my belt, I returned to our cozy home on Jericho Rd, where my patient wife, and my children and grand-children from Michigan and North Carolina were filling the house with love and laughter.

It would be difficult to think of any place I’d rather be right now than Kidron, Ohio, where the men are homely, but steadily improving, the women are beautiful for the most part, and nearly all of the children come back home - at least for the holidays.