Cows Aplenty, but No Quilts in Amish Country
After a whirlwind trip to New York City last week for my 10th high school reunion, I stopped in rural Ohio on my way home to visit my sister, who is a freshman at Kenyon College.
Clean air and simple living were just what I needed after two stress-filled days of trying to one-up my former classmates. Plus, Kathleen had been tempting me for months with charming stories about Amish craftspeople selling their wares on campus out of their buggies.
An Amish quilt is just the chic touch my living room needs.
The drive from the airport was an olfactory tour of the farm. First, we sniffed the cows, then the skunks . . . it was all so quaint. I toured the campus, including the infamous entrance to the school, dubbed the “gates of hell” by students who have heard too many ghost stories. Killing time as I hoped for the buggies to arrive, I inspected Kathleen’s dorm room (and roommate), and picked up some logo wear.
The afternoon waned without the clatter of horses’ hooves. Fearing the Amish were going to be no-shows, I decided to call them. The phone book had a listing for Amish Creations, a store on Main Street in Gambier.
When we got there, it turned out the store only sold Amish furniture, not quilts, and no way was I going to try to cram a hutch in the airplane overhead storage bin. Defeated, we headed back to campus. The next day was the Lord’s day and it was time to face facts: I was going home quilt-less.
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If I couldn’t have a chic simple quilt, maybe I could have a chic simple life. I picked up the first issue of the new women’s magazine Real Simple, at the airport, sure that I could streamline my life by the time the jet landed in L.A.
For a simple wardrobe, the fashion pages suggest the “new basics,” a $136 chalk-colored sleeveless knit top and a $390 pair of white cotton trousers.
Spending on fresh flowers every week is a good idea because “the nourishment you get from flowers pays for itself.”
The Real Simple life was going to cost a lot more than the complicated life I am already living, but I read on, hoping the magazine would reveal a simple way to pay for it all.
Instead, it revealed a knack for stating the obvious. In a feature about stress reduction, Francine Prose shares her “revelation” after running out of gas in Vermont.
If only she’d followed the Three-Quarters Rule, which “suggests that you face a situation and take action as soon as something is three-fourths gone.”
Living by the rule could prevent us from the horror of discovering that the butter is gone “after we’ve made that welcoming little hollow in our mound of steaming mashed potatoes.”
I decided to follow Prose’s sage advice and ditched the magazine after reading three-quarters of it. Perhaps they should have called it Real Simple if You’re Real Rich and Real Stupid.
