Amish Country Kitsch
Before I was old enough to drive, my dad and I used to ride our dirt bikes through Amish country to Charm. There used to be a little restaurant over there where you could sit at a counter and get a great piece of pie. Today, sleepy little Holmes County is filled with semi-trailers and tourists. The cafe that used to be so popular with the local Amish is now a tourist trap. The walls are covered with kitschy little fabric wall hangings with pictures of a very Nordic-looking Jesus. Offered for sale, along with musical clocks and postcards of Amish school children, the fabric hangings are sort of the Mennonite equivalent of paint me on velvet.
The food, which isn’t memorable, is offered in ‘Amish style’. From my point of view, that’s all to the best, because the Amish tend to cook like any other midwestern farmers, concentrating on chicken, mashed potatoes, overcooked green beans, and jellow. We were right next to the kitchen, and you could watch the waitresses mixing up the ‘homemade lemonade’ (no live citrus fruit was in sight).
Once you’ve lived in Europe for a while, there are certain things about America that strike you as being…special. Until you’ve been gone, you just don’t notice all the unique things that makes Americans great. One such hugely obvious characteristic is the amount of gravitas that so many people bring with them. Sure, there are people of substance everywhere in the world, but this part of the world seems to have a special ice age gene for energy storage, and apparently, large amounts of meat & potatoes are especially appealing to the large crowd at the restaurant. The waitress was polite, and didn’t comment on the fact that we didn’t clear our plates.
After eating our pie, we sat outside and watched horse & buggies dodging the sport utes.