Small Notes, Small Moments

Weaver Leather Supply: best smelling store ever. Ever.
(Photo from the store website.)

Monday Warren and I went out of town for Hyer Percussion matters that he absolutely needed to tend to. After starting my day getting my 2nd Covid-19 2024-2025 shot (I get two because I am so special), we took off in the car headed to the Millersburg area, which is known as the Heart of Amish Ohio. We were not there to sample Amish country, although it was all around us; we were there for the business matters.

During the day, we stopped at Keim Home Center in Charm, at which Warren found the sycamore board of his dreams (seriously); Keim was great but we went there only because I failed to catch the county road turnoff to Yoder Lumber after we had been to Weaver Leather Supply, which was our first stop of the day. 

Although it was a business trip and ended up taking longer than we had anticipated, in part because of missed turns, it was a great day. It was good for both of us to get out of town and away from the house and all of its demands. With a pen and paper, I captured a few notes about what we saw:

• A church sign at the Methodist church in Danville: "We stand tallest when we stoop to help one another." Be still, my heart.
• A yard with several blue, 5-gallon water jugs, upside down and firmly fixed to wood blocks, with holes cut large enough for the chickens that populated the yard to each have her own apartment. (Don't ask me about the rooster; I didn't see him.)
• Electric bikes being ridden everywhere by Amish women carting children, groceries, and such. Solar panels at Amish farms. 
• Passing several yards with small or large apiaries and my recognizing (from reading books on beekeeping) that the hives were still under their winter wraps. 
• I love draft horses and they are big (no pun intended) in Amish country because the farmers use them instead of tractors. I saw a team of four pulling a plow to turn the soil. My favorite was a team of two Belgians, harnessed to a large farm wagon, steadily pulling up to the stop sign on a side road and waiting for us to go by, their elderly owner sitting on the seat; the horses knew what they were doing.
• Having the best brown bag lunch ever maybe, which we ate in the parking lot of Weaver Leather. Of course, we took our own lunch. We had the best lunch ever because Sunday afternoon was a Symphony concert, and by the time it finished and Warren and friends got the timpani and other percussion instruments home, we were cold, hungry, and exhausted. A quick trip to City Barbeque solved that issue; we each saved half of our delicious Sunday night pulled pork sandwiches as the foundation of our Monday parking lot lunch. Great move.
• An Amish buggy parked in front of a Dollar General, quite possibly the only "general store/grocery" in the area, and an older woman, dressed properly in the long skirts and covering cloak, a kapp on her head, headed to the buggy with a full bag on her arm. [Note: Amish women drive buggies; they do not need a man to accompany them. We passed several with often two women chatting away as one drove.]

By the time we got home at 5:00, I was tired and my arm was sore, but the day was a huge business success. (In fact, this morning, Warren was on the phone with Pat Weaver of the aforementioned leather company, about a custom die they will be making for him after we all met yesterday and determined whether it would work.) We had a frozen pizza in the basement freezer, I made a quick salad, and that took care of our supper, which we ate while we both relaxed and talked over the day.

The trip was good as a getaway, and as an important step forward for Warren's business, but it was good for another reason. We are starting to plan a trip out to Portland/Vancouver this summer. When we got back home, I told Warren that I really loved spending the day out driving and doing, but I think the trip convinced me that driving cross-country, timing issues aside (because we have matters here in Delaware that we cannot just set aside for several weeks), is out of the question for me physically unless we stop a LOT. A WHOLE lot. Warren said he felt the same way about both of us. So we talked about starting to sketch out some date and start looking at flights. That was a hard realization, but I reminded myself that while I am about to turn 69 chronologically, 20 years of treatment plus that fun little episode in 2023 has aged me by at least a decade. (And those are doctors speaking, not April feeling sorry for herself.) 

It was a great day full of love, full of talk, full of being together. It doesn't get any better than that.