What's That in the Car Park?

I did a double take. But actually, around here, it's not so unusual. Many Amish families have been moving in, taking over dilapidated farmhouses and starting new communities. Buggy signs have appeared on the roads.

  I’m always surprised by the contrasts of life in America. Yes, the Americans have consumerism and materialism and terrible television. But they also have the Amish.

    The first Amish farmhouse I saw was neat, if slightly peeling, with a long washing line attached high up on the barn, on which hung wide trousers, shirts and aprons, all in shades of blue.  We knew it was Amish because there were no electric or telephone cables going to the house, no cars or tractors in the yard, just a couple of black horse buggies parked among the straw bales.  A hut outside had a handwritten sign:  “Baked Goods. Closed on Sundays”.  A girl came out of the house – she could have been any age from 12 to 30, barefoot, in a long dress of  heavy blue cloth, fastened not with zips or buttons, but pins. She wore a cap over her hair and spoke in an odd, German-sounding accent. She was polite but not effusive – very un-American. She apologized that there were only a couple of pies left but we bought what she had. As we left, a row of children, boys in straw hats and baggy trousers with braces, little girls in bonnets, waved shyly from the porch. I tell you those pies were the best I’d ever tasted. 

  The Amish, from the European Anabaptist tradition, are a Christian sect that believes in a humble, pacifist, family-oriented life, foregoing luxuries and modernity. Like many other religious groups, they found a haven in America, first arriving in the early eighteenth century. Now they live in 22 states and in Canada.

  Our local western New York Amish are the Old Order  – the strictest. They have no electricity, cars, washing machines, telephones, though they can use a diesel engine for a lumber business, for example. Their clothes are always blue or black.  The men, once they marry, grow long beards framing their faces – but never a moustache. The children go to special Amish schools until age fourteen, when they leave to help on the farm.

  Their life may look simple but the Amish have excellent business skills. They sell baskets, woodcarvings,  pickled beets, peach preserve, apple butter, vegetables – and build the best barns, which they’ll do for the market price and a lift in your pickup truck (allowed, so long as someone else drives).  The local tourist office issues maps showing which farms in the back roads sell what and reminding visitors to treat the Amish with respect, not to take photographs and never never to expect them to open up on Sundays. “Going to the Amish” is a popular excursion among our neighbours and people from much further afield.

   And the supreme “Going to the Amish” experience is buying a quilt. At our favourite place, in an outbuilding warmed by a wood stove, was a massive bed,  piled with layers and layers of spectacular quilts,  in age-old patterns. The couple, Elizabeth and Levi, were a good team, he lifting each quilt, while she explained the one underneath. We chose one called “heart of roses’ – each rose petal exquisitely embroidered by hand. Elizabeth, in Dickensian black bonnet and stout boots, wrapped the quilt in a bin liner and gave us washing instructions – cold water and salt . She had a map on the wall in which she’d stuck pins marking where her customers had come from.  There were several pins in Britain.  

   The Amish successfully and serenely manage to be both of the world and out of it. You can be driving on a country road and see an Amish horse and buggy trotting along at a spanking rate, complete with red safety triangle on the back. (Unfortunately there have been collisions, especially when people don't know to expect them.).  We saw an Amish couple at an auction, cannily buying up those old sewing machines you work with your feet.  They pay for their hospital treatment in cash – reputedly getting a good deal.  They’re law-abiding, peaceful and pay their taxes. And people admire them for sticking to their principles.
  But I wish the Amish family who had a stall at our local farmers' market would come back - they sold the most delectable doughnuts. 

Not for the Faint-Hearted

 I had better warn you that what follows is not for the squeamish.  But it might serve as a reality check for my London friends who envy my life in rural Western New York bliss.

  It’s true that, where I once had a balcony and two plant pots, I’ve now got a veritable Garden of Eden – rolling acres with a twinkling mountain stream,  chipmunks  scampering  around,   woodchucks waddling onto the porch, white tail deer lying down to sleep in dappled glades,  wild turkeys  sweetly teaching  their children  to fly from our garden furniture, hummingbirds and fat bumble bees  buzzing  melodiously among the flowers.

  Never mind that the acres are mostly jungle,   the chipmunks and woodchucks have dug a network of tunnels under the lawn worthy of Colditz Castle, the  turkeys  guzzle up all the blueberries,  the deer treat the shrubs like a buffet, the bees have managed to make a nest above the porch and the flowers mostly drown in triffid-like weeds, whose powers of growth and regeneration dwarf those of their counterparts in Britain. Whatever they’re on should be patented by some pharmaceutical company.   Perhaps the flora and fauna are all the more vibrant here because of the shortness of our summer. We’re in a constant battle with nature and nature always wins.  

     And it seems that, every year, nature throws some new delight at me.  Actually, did I say that nature always wins?  Not quite always.   A couple of summers ago, the lad who mows what passes for our lawn, was giving it a  vigorous going-over.   After he’d finished, I discovered a casualty.   A small snake had gone to its just deserts.  I tweaked it with a stick and a shudder,  then did a double take, backed away  and screamed for hubby,

  “Quick! Come here! I think it’s -  it’s - omigosh - I think it’s a rattlesnake!”

Hubby came running and scrutinised the corpse,  “I don’t see a rattle. ”

  “Yes but it’s just been run over by the lawnmower – it’s not exactly in good shape!  The rattle could be, well, anywhere!”

   I went weak at the knees and clutched at hubby’s arm.  I’m used to the snakes around here they call garden snakes. I don’t like them but they’re totally harmless. This one’s markings looked very different.

  I rushed to the internet and with shaking fingers looked up  websites with graphic photos of “Snakes of Western New York”,  the Common Garter Snake, the Black Rat Snake, the Eastern Hognose Snake et al.  Our victim  didn’t look like any of those. Until I got to the photo of, yes, you’ve guessed it, the Timber Rattlesnake.

   “You told me you didn’t have rattlesnakes here!” I howled to hubby, “That was before we were married of course!”

   The poor man shrugged,  “Well I didn’t think we did. I knew there were some in Pennsylvania……”

  “But that’s only half an hour away!”

  “Hang on”,   said hubby,  trying to regain control of the situation. “Look at the map of their territory. See, our bit isn’t shaded..”

  “Snakes can’t read maps!”   

   I must admit,  I was beginning to lose it.  Where there was one rattler, there might be hundreds  more and where had it come from, if not from under our garden shed? I was mentally packing my suitcase for England. Even hubby, for all his bravado,  looked a little green-around-the-gills.  “Maybe”, he suggested, “We could take another look?”

  Gingerly I went and studied the deceased a bit closer. I turned it over. It had a sort of chessboard pattern on its underside, and red blotches  with black lines around them.

   We went back to the internet. Suddenly a flood of relief swept over me. There was a photo I’d missed. “Eastern Milk Snake,” it said,  “Checkerboard pattern on its underside”, it said,  “Red blotches with a black line around them”, it said, “Harmless” it said.

  I told a friend about it afterwards. She fell about laughing. “You thought it was a what?!”

 “Well yes and then it turned out to be..”

“Don’t tell me – a milk snake!”

 “There”, said hubby, “Didn’t I tell you? Nothing to worry about!”  

  “This time,”  I muttered under my breath. 

 Did someone mention the Garden of Eden? 

Watch out. This one's alive.

A Strange Creature

It didn't look like any butterfly or moth I'd ever seen but there it was, poking at the flowers with a strange-looking hooked nose. Was it some weird mutant flown in from lands beyond? In fact, I almost thought it was a hummingbird, of which we have a few in summer, buzzing around briskly like tiny helicopters. But it was much too small, of course.
  Then I happened to be looking at the Hummingbird page in my new Birds of New York Field Guide (by Stan Tekiela). And in the section called "Compare", it said as follows:  "No other bird is as tiny. The Sphinx Moth also hovers at flowers but has clear wings and a mouth part  that looks like a straw which coils up when not at flowers. Doesn't hum in flight, moves much slower than the Hummingbird and can be approached. "  Sounds just the chap. Golly, thanks, Stan! Nice to know my mind is not yet completely addled.

A Garden Walk, American Style

   The end of summer is fast approaching and my flowers are fast fading - those that escaped the ravages of caterpillars, Japanese beetles, slugs and other marauding Western New York fauna.

  I am a novice when it comes to Western New York gardening – or any gardening for that matter. My late summer garden  has been a sea of yellow, since the daisy-like black-eyed Susans  multiply like weeds around here and thrive in the cold winters and sharp temperature changes that kill off the more temperamental plants. So my repertoire has been limited to them and a few other hardy types, though I draw the line at hostas,  those dreary bunches of leaves sending up spindly stems topped with tiny, anaemic blooms, that all my American neighbours seem to love. 

  But I would like to be a bit more adventurous and earlier in the summer,  I noticed an announcement advertising a “Garden Walk” in aid of the local homeless shelter. For a small fee,  we’d be invited to see the best efforts of our local green-fingered (Americans say “green-thumbed” ) enthusiasts.

   Interestingly, this side of the pond, they don’t use the word “garden” in the British way. Here, if you mention a “garden”,  people automatically think of a vegetable patch, although it can also mean a flower bed.  Some small nephews once visited us and I suggested they go out and “play in the garden”.  They looked flabbergasted and then delighted  and were just about to get their football and  trample the petunias to smithereens, when their mother fortunately stepped in to translate. “No! She means the yard!”

 And while we’re on the subject, the word “walk”, as in “Garden Walk”, doesn’t actually mean a walk. It’s a well-known  fact that you can’t easily separate Americans from their cars.  “Walk” is just an expression. I would, hubby warned,  have to drive to all these gardens and probably a long way. He was right.

   Ascertaining that the gardens would actually contain flowers,  I bought my ticket and map and set off.   

   The houses taking part were marked with blue-and-white balloons and a sign outside.
  One of the first gardens belonged to a retired doctor.  He was as happy as Larry, having found his true vocation, nursing along a sea of gorgeous red poppies and other exquisite flora like paprika yarrow and rose campion. He kindly gave me some seeds.

   There were cottages with white picket fences,  log cabins with sweeping views over the hills, ponds with darting dragonflies. And there was the Manor, an unlikely name for this modest part of upstate  New York  – we’re not the swanky Hudson Valley here. The  balloons at the grand gateway had popped and at first I wasn’t sure if I’d come to the right place. I didn’t want to encounter some irate owner with a shotgun. But the Manor turned out to be not that grand, the chatelaine  a typical friendly Western New Yorker, “You’re from Britain! Oh do come and visit again!”  But the rolling grounds with their specimen trees and lake might have been designed by Capability Brown. That’s the beauty of this part of the world.  You can pick up a Manor for the price of a small London flat.   

    As I  wandered  all the emerald-green lawns,   the pergolas swathed in purple clematis, the winding stone paths and pristine decks,  the flowers  three times as tall and five times as vigorous as mine, with even the hostas looking perky, I started to feel just a mite inadequate.  American gardens, I’ve discovered,  differ from mine not least because they’re so neat and tidy, the beds perfectly edged, the bushes perfectly trimmed and everything snuggled in perfectly uniform mulch.

   Sighing, I resolved to redouble my efforts to get my weed-infested jungle under control.

  But as I drove home, I noticed the wildflowers by the side of the road. They’re in their blue-and-white phase now.  And they’re lovely.  And no-one’s spent hours mulching them.

Of Things to Come

Alas, our trails are starting to look just a little autumnal. Though it looks like we might get a fairly good apple crop this year.

Last year, sadly, an early frost did for them. It happens a lot around here.

Yellow seems to be the colour of spring - and of late summer.

No one wants these berries, not even the birds. They just look pretty - and why not?

A stray red leaf is a portent of things to come.

Now I wonder who lives here?

A Bigger Boat Than Ours

And one of the prettiest sights in Buffalo Harbour, the "Spirit of Buffalo" sails out past the historic lighthouse. Actually the Spirit was built in 1992 and is only a replica of an old schooner.  The lighthouse is a lot older.

But never mind, we always like to see her. Here she is again, snapped from our boat.

And out on the horizon.

Meanwhile, someone's enjoying the quiet life.

Unlike the passengers on the "Moondance Cat", owned by a local TV station.  But they do seem to be having a good time.

And here's Moondance Cat with the 90 per cent empty HSBC building in the background.

You Never Know...

 Funny how it takes just a small thing to put a smile on your face. The charming young lad at the checkout at Tops supermarket today said he was a Man United fan. He'd been to elementary school with a friend who came from Manchester, "So I always cheer for Man U",  he grinned. Well isn't that nice. He did not, however have a view on this season's prospects. Better avoid that subject.