Worry Ends Where Faith Begins

By Stephanie Schwartz

Can Phoebe find happiness as a single Amish woman? Is this God’s will for her?
Phoebe Schwartz tries her best to remain thankful while resigned to living a single life within her midwestern Amish community, surrounded by friends and family, many of whom have large families and seemingly endless babies. Is this all part of God’s plan for her? Is this His will? Is loneliness just another part of her fate? Does she have the faith to believe this simple life is everything and she will find happiness too?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melange Books, LLC
• Release date: Nov 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9798886530315

Stephanie Schwartz

Midwife-turned-author, Stephanie Schwartz seems to swim seamlessly through cultures, religions, superstitions, raw fear and ecstasy to the first breath of a new baby. She invites her readers to join her, taking us on a tour to the innermost workings of another world while giving us a rare, intimate glimpse into her daily life. She has five children scattered around the world, grandchildren, and over a thousand babies she calls her own. After writing three books on birth, and then retiring as a midwife, she realized she had most likely been in more Amish bedrooms—as a midwife—than most other authors of Amish romance novels and began researching the genre. Thanks to the Pandemic she was able to produce the novels in the Amish Nurse Series, hopefully reflecting an authentic glimpse into another world.

Book preview

Part One

Chapter One

Phoebe looked out the window as she polished the last lamp chimney on the kitchen table that had been lined up with the others she had gathered from around the house earlier that morning. It was going to be another hot day. The air practically shimmered across the alfalfa fields.

Five lamps done, she told herself. Best to trim the lamps in the morning, otherwise you might forget and then when you need them in the evening they won’t be clean or filled.

She topped off the bottom chamber with kerosene, carefully screwing the cap back on, and moved the lamp to the ‘done’ side of the oilcloth-covered table. Another day just like yesterday, she told herself, breathing out an audible sigh. Summer in the 1980s looked very much like it did in the 1960s and would in all likelihood look the same in the Amish world in the next century, too. And the day before that… she thought to herself, but that would turn out to be very far from the truth. Today would change her whole life. Forever. And she had no idea what was coming as she dreamily gazed out the window and across the golden fields to her right.

Then noticing a horse and buggy on the county road to her left, she watched absentmindedly as the horse trotted briskly along the shoulder of the road pulling a black buggy behind him, (or her,) rode on past her family’s farm, past the row of weeping willows and on up the road and out of sight. Then she wondered wistfully who was in that buggy, certainly not a young man on his way to see her. Oh, how she longed to be courted. If only—but it had not happened yet. Not once. All her girlfriends had gotten married already. Fine weddings they had too. She was often asked to be one of the attendants, but that is as close as she’d ever been to being in a wedding.

Her mind wandered once again to the home she was now convinced she would never have. Sometimes she admonished herself and left daydreaming to others. But today she was discouraged. It was hot and life seemed so… so monotonous sometimes. One brother, a hopeless pessimist, had once summed it up this way while greeting the family at breakfast one morning: Another weary, dreary day, as if this life was just made up of days that you put in, days you ticked off on a calendar, waiting for the real thing, until you die. Some called it fatalistic; thinking that we have no choice in it, but to her there were still too many utterly beautiful things that God gave us to make this life worth living, even enjoying. Babies were one. Would she ever have a house full of them? So many, in fact, that she would be run ragged by the end of each day, only then falling into bed with—a man? And what would that be like? The thought scared her while at the same time sending shivers up her back. Strong arms holding her, her head resting on his chest, then longing… Now she spent her days alone with Mamm and Dat. They were great. Mamm was wise and industrious and kind. Dat was funny and eternally telling bad jokes or making up puns that left them all hopelessly groaning. And there was Alice, their beautiful roan horse and the cats and the cows. Her older brothers, Abe and Isaac, had already married and built their own homes on Dat’s land, living close enough to all work together. Her parents had married late; both were in their mid-thirties when they met. They only had the three children, far fewer than many other families in their district. One family had thirteen bobbeli. Phoebe knew that house was never lonely, but the work and the huddlich were also never ending with such a large family. I won’t have to worry about having that many kinner at the rate I’m going, she thought to herself.

Turning away from the window, she finished the lamps, and picking up two, headed for the upstairs bedrooms. As she set each lamp on a bedstand, she shut the window and pulled closed the curtains. It’s best to shut the cool night air in the house so we don’t bake all day, she reasoned. Without air conditioning or electric fans, a house could get mighty hot on a summer day in the Midwest. Old Order Amish homes don’t have electricity, so you make do with what you have.

Earlier, before starting on the lamps, Phoebe had set three sadirons to heat up on the cookstove pointing toward the back of the iron stovetop. Invented in the early seventeen hundreds, the heavy iron appliance has served generations of women before the advent of electricity and the modern standard iron used today by women the world over—except those who continue to eschew electricity, like the Amish who still lived in the last century or earlier according to some, in spite of it being the 1980s.

There was only a small pile waiting to be ironed, having been brought in from the wash lines the evening before. After Mamm was finished making breakfast and the fire in the wood box had settled down, the irons would be plenty hot, and Phoebe could set up the ironing board in the kitchen out of the way of any traffic. The weight alone from the molded cast iron could smooth out any wrinkles but the added heat worked very efficiently to get the job done. Rotating through the three irons would ensure Phoebe had a hot one ready as soon as the one she was using cooled enough to warrant reheating. One wrought iron handle served all three, easily detaching from the last iron when the next iron took its turn. They came in especially handy when sewing a dress or shirt or a quilt top. The seams on the wrong side of the garment would be permanently flattened after the sadiron did its best. A bottle of water with a spray top sat on the ironing board to add steam to the fabrics being ironed.

Chapter Two

Grossmammi’s favorite saying was, Be genuine. Be kind, and thoughtful. But most of all, be thankful. Phoebe was thankful. She loved her home, her family, her community and her church and knew they had been very blessed indeed. They worked hard, they prayed hard, and then left the rest to God. A simple life, yes, but lonely sometimes, too.

She had prayed earnestly for years, seven to be exact, since her sixteenth birthday that God would find a husband for her. When nothing turned up after seven years, (plus three months and eight days, but then who was keeping track anyway?) she had a good think about this husband business and went to ask her grandmother for advice. Grossmammi always had advice. Gut advice, too.

"Gott will find you a husband in exactly the right time, my dear. You don’t want to rush Him. Being desperate and taking someone you don’t love could make your life a living hell," Mammi nodded knowingly. "Gott might think being single is best for some, too, but then you will find joy in other ways. We don’t need to fret. ‘Worry ends where faith begins,’ they say."

Phoebe was twenty-three, not exactly an old maud, but she felt like that most days. She was also taller than a lot of the girls she knew. The tiny, skinny ones always get picked first, she reminded herself. Thinking back to what Grossmammi said about not fretting, she took herself in hand and turned back to her chores. Her older brothers—they still called them ‘the boys’—took over the dairy farm when they married, so she no longer had to milk cows. Good riddance! She would never marry a cow farmer she’d promised herself.

Phoebe had taught school for three years already and looked forward to returning to the cozy one-room schoolhouse in the fall if the school board offered to renew her contract. She loved teaching school. It was like having twenty children of her very own for seven hours every day, little ones, big ones, all shapes and sizes, even ztzvilling (twins.) Since it was less than two miles from her home, she usually hitched Alice to the smaller open trap buggy and kept her in the little stable by the school during the day, or if the weather was particularly nice, she walked to school. Some of the students’ dats drove their buggies by her place on their way as they took their kinner to school each morning and she sometimes waved down a ride with them on the days her dat needed the carriage to go to town.

Phoebe was thinking about what needed to be done to get the school ready for the new year when her mamm called her to breakfast. She sniffed the air as she came down the stairs. Mmmm, cinnamon rolls. That’s a treat, she told herself. Huh, smells like fresh cut hay, too. Abe or Isaac must be out there already. I bet it’s plenty hot. Dat would be in any moment from his chores in the barn.

Phoebe wasn’t skinny-skinny, but not fat either, just pleasantly plump, Mamm said. Her hairs were an auburn brown, almost as brown as Alice, thick and quite wavy. Her eyes were a grayish blue. She liked wearing blue dresses that showed off her eyes. She wasn’t pretty like she wished, not like the fair damsels she admired in the picture books and Bibles she had read as a child. She wasn’t homely. Just Plain. Like Mamm. Mamm’s hairs were all but white, but her skin was tanned, a sure sign of being a farmer’s wife. She still walked with a spring in her step, which reflected her health. But looks weren’t everything. Beauty is only skin deep, she had been reminded so often. The heart has to be kind, too. That’s where a wife’s worth lies. Even the Bible says that. Her own mamm had trained her well. She was a perfect example. She was cheerful, honest, loving, thoughtful, kind, and studious. Her home was a happy place. She went out of her way to help others and taught her children to do the same. Mamm and Dat were both in their sixties now, but they were in gut health and still quite industrious. Dat must have been quite tall, dark and handsome once, Phoebe surmised as she watched him working in the fields with the horses. His beard was now a long salt and pepper version of what she remembered from childhood, but he didn’t seem old, not like Doddy.

Mamm still managed the garden, planting vegetable and flower seeds the moment Dat’s tiller came out of the ground in early May. She had little starter plants growing from seeds indoors as early as February. The egg cartons holding all the tiny seedlings threatened to overtake the house; there were so many lined up along the living room and kitchen base boards where they wouldn’t get stepped on.

The seed catalogs started showing up at the house every August, even before the harvest had been brought in. Mamm still planted a huge garden even though the boys weren’t eating with them every day, often sending vegetables home, saying she knew their wives were too busy with new bobbeli to have big gardens.

In the fall, Mamm would have the kitchen humming from dawn to dusk with canning or drying the garden’s bounty, making enough for the boys’ families too. She loved making pickles—sweet and sour pickles, garlic dills, sweet bread-’n-butter pickles, even sweeter little Gherkins—and jams and chow-chow, pears, fruit leather, apple butter, and pumpkin pie and mince pie filling, spicy stewed tomatoes. She dried her own herbs, too. Oregano for tomato sauce, fennel for homemade sausage, chives for salads, sage for chicken dishes, parsley for soups come winter, and huge elephant garlic for everything else, which was braided and hung in the kitchen, but not too close to the wood stove where it would otherwise perfume the entire house as it warmed up.

Phoebe loved the fall best. She loved working alongside Mamm in the kitchen as the rows of colorful jars grew in the root cellar. Each evening, they would lead Dat downstairs to admire all the jars they had put up that day. He warned Mamm not to get too brot of it all. Mamm would answer that it was just such satisfying work to put food by for the coming year. Last year after studying all the colorful jars—plums next to pickles, jellies next to mustard beans—he said, You know, it might be a whole lot less work and fuss if I just bought you some colored sand to fill all those jars with, which sent them all into gales of laughter. Dat had a quirky sense of humor, which never ceased to surprise Mamm. Even now, after over forty years of marriage, they still found moments throughout the day, when they didn’t think anyone was looking, Phoebe in particular, when they would steal a kiss between them, sometimes even a hug, too. Phoebe wondered how they could still be so very much in love after all those years. She found it sweet. But she did not think it was going to be in God’s will for her.

She tried to convince herself that it wasn’t all there was to life, that other things could be just as fulfilling. The world was full of opportunities, she told herself, though her next thought squashed that reasoning. Yeah, right. An uneducated Amische frau doesn’t have all that many options left when all is said and done. She had only recently stopped praying at her night prayers for a husband. It obviously hadn’t been working. Before that, she had even begun to omit the part about him being tall, dark or handsome. She was ready to take a second look around at the short, fat, not-so-handsome single or even widowed, balding men at the church gatherings. God would surely be able to find someone she could learn to love, couldn’t He?

Chapter Three

The bishops from the neighboring six districts didn’t usually meet unless there was an extremely dire situation they needed to address. Settling themselves around the table at Bishop Lehman’s house, his wife Rosanne set plates of pie and mugs of coffee on the table before each elder as quietly as she could so as not to distract from the meeting. Then the bishops bowed their heads for the silent grace. After a moment Bishop Lehman said aloud, " Vella essa ," and at that they dug into the pie.

The kitchen was cool; it was still early. Rosanne had already closed up the house, but it was light enough even with the blue curtains shut not to need to ignite the mantle lamp hanging above the table where the bishops sat. Bishop Lehman waited until his wife left the kitchen to attend to her chores before he began, smoothing out a tiny wrinkle in the gingham tablecloth before him with his finger while he waited.

Then he began. We have a problem here that we need to discuss. You know Andrew Miller died last week in the hospital. His doctor wouldn’t let us bring him home in his final days, saying we didn’t have anyone to care for him properly. The doctor said he could find a private nurse to come ’round every day and give him his injections, but that might not cover his pain enough and asked if we would be able to hire nurses ’round the clock?

The bishops all nodded, their brows deeply furrowed with concern, their mouths full of cherry pie.

"And then we have the problem of all these C-sections. I don’t know why it seems that’s all they do now. Are they really necessary? They are a huge expense besides it takes longer for mamms to recover. And then they are at risk of having an automatic C-section with their next bobbel."

"I’ve been thinking