A New Home for Lily Read online

  When school dismissed for the day, Teacher Rhoda helped Lily pin her shawl. It was time for the long, cold walk back home. Marvin and Ezra waited until she was ready and then walked beside Joseph and her. Aaron ran ahead with his friends. Lily was glad he didn’t stay to walk with his brothers. They were much nicer than he was.

  A wave of exhaustion rolled over Lily as she trudged through the thick snow. She hoped Mama would have a nice snack waiting when they got home. She sighed all the way home.

  When they reached Lily’s ugly olive green house, Marvin and Ezra didn’t stop to come inside. They waved goodbye and said they would see them tomorrow. Then they crossed the road and disappeared on a little path that led into the woods.

  As Lily entered the warm, cozy kitchen, she found Mama working at the sink. Dannie stood on a chair next to her, watching everything Mama was doing, the way Lily used to when she was little. He nibbled on a slice of raw potato that was sprinkled with salt. Mama offered a potato slice to Lily and Joseph. “So how was your first day of school?”

  Joseph launched in eagerly about his first day of real school. He told Mama about his desk and his books and the boys that he could play with at recess. So many boys! An abundance. He told her about the story Teacher Rhoda had read to them after noon recess and about his shiny new pencil. Sometimes Lily thought that Joseph babbled like a brook.

  Lily felt pale and droopy and all she could think of was what Effie had said about her name. When Joseph ran out of things to report, Mama turned to Lily. “How did you like your first day of school?” she asked, because Lily wasn’t saying.

  Out blurted, “Why in the world did you and Papa give me such a fancy name?”

  Mama’s brown eyes widened with surprise. She set the potato she had been peeling aside and carefully washed her hands and wiped them on her apron. “Let’s go talk about it.”

  Lily followed Mama into the living room and sat next to her on the sofa. Joseph and Dannie followed them in and sat on the floor, all eyes and ears. There was absolutely no privacy with those two brothers.

  “When God gave us a little baby girl, Papa and I were very happy,” Mama said. “We wanted to give her a special name. Papa’s great-grandmother was named Lily and she was a very kind woman. We hoped that our little girl would grow up to be kind and sweet just like she was. And we both liked the name Lily. We knew it wasn’t a name that many other Amish girls had, but we wanted you to have it. Papa’s great-grandmother was very pleased when she heard what name we had chosen for you.”

  Relief flooded through Lily. She should have known that Papa and Mama always did the right thing.

  “Is there a reason you are asking about your name today, Lily?” Mama said.

  Lily smoothed out her dress. “A girl named Effie Kauffman said it wasn’t a humble name.”

  Mama smiled. “I don’t think I would worry too much about what this Effie Kauffman thinks. I think Lily fits you just fine.”

  After eating the soup Mama had made for supper, Lily helped wash and dry dishes, and then it was time for bed. Tonight, for the first time that Lily could remember, she didn’t mind when Papa announced, in his deep, soft voice, that it was eight o’clock. “Bedtime for little lambs.” He had a fine voice, Papa did.

  As she snuggled under the covers, she reviewed her day. All in all, it wasn’t as bad a day as she had feared it to be. Teacher Rhoda was nice, much nicer than Teacher Katie. And then there was Beth. But two things she knew for certain: she would never be friends with sassy-mouthed Aaron Yoder or with snooty-faced Effie Kauffman.

  She sighed.

  2

  The Red Door

  Lily’s bedroom was cozy and comfortable, but it wasn’t really a bedroom. It was the corner of a hall. Next to her bed was her dresser. On top of the dresser was her pretty little white lamp with pink flowers. A door beside the dresser opened into a bedroom and that’s where Joseph and Dannie slept.

  And in the boys’ room was a painted red door.

  Mama told Lily and her brothers that they needed to wait for permission to open that red door. Lily couldn’t stop thinking about it. What was behind the door? Where did it lead? Maybe it just opened to the outside, like the hayloft in the barn. Then she worried that Joseph and Dannie might get too curious and open the door. They would fall to the ground like a couple of stones. Boys could be like that. Too curious.

  Lily whispered her worry to Mama. “No,” Mama said. “The red door doesn’t lead to the outside. Please remember not to let your imagination run away with you.”

  Finally, on Saturday morning, Mama said to Lily, “Today, you can take your brothers and go exploring behind that red door.” Carefully, holding her breath, Lily opened the red door. It led to a set of stairs.

  Lily held Dannie’s hand as they climbed the stairs. When they reached the top, they had to stop while their eyes adjusted to the dark. It was just a cold attic. Lily was disappointed, but on top of the disappointment rushed in curiosity.

  On one side of the room were boxes, piled high. Those boxes had been brought with them on the big truck from New York, waiting to be unpacked until Mama had room for the things. Lily hoped the box that held Sally in it was here. She still hadn’t found Sally.

  On the other side of the room were piles and piles of things that the former owners had left behind. There were stacks of puzzles and games and boxes filled with books and newspapers. In front of a little window, Lily spotted several pink and yellow Easter baskets. Propped up against the wall were two guitars.

  Lily’s fingers wiggled at her side. She wanted to strum the strings on the guitars. What did they sound like? What did a guitar feel like? But she didn’t touch the guitars. She knew that they didn’t belong to them. Papa and Mama wouldn’t be happy if they heard Lily had poked into other people’s things. Still, she could look. She and Joseph and Dannie walked all around the boxes and tried to see everything they could without touching anything. Too soon, they heard Papa’s voice at the top of the attic stairs. “Lunch is ready,” he said. He took a few steps into the attic and looked around, hands on his hips. “Looks like we will have a lot of sorting to do. They sure left a lot of things here.”

  Lily clambered around the boxes to reach Papa’s side. “Do you think we can keep everything?” She hoped Papa would say that they could play with all those wonderful toys and games and read those books and maybe—just maybe—strum the guitars.

  “It’s all ours now,” Papa said. After catching the excited look on Lily and Joseph’s faces, he quickly added, “But I don’t want you to be playing with anything until Mama and I have sorted everything and decided what to keep and what to sell.”

  Lily knew what that meant. More waiting.

  One Saturday later, Papa told the family to get their coats on. “We’re going up in the attic,” he said, grinning. It was much colder up there than in the rest of the house.

  Papa carried one of the kitchen chairs up for Mama to sit on while they sorted through boxes. Mama said he was spoiling her, but she seemed pleased. “I’ll bring things over to show you, Rachel,” he said. “Lily and Joseph can help me and you can decide what to keep or not.” Dannie’s job was to sit beside Mama and play with toys and books.

  Papa started with the boxes that were the closest to them. Box after box held nothing but clothes, clothes, clothes. They weren’t even clothes that they would wear. Boring! But Mama seemed delighted. “We’ll remove all the buttons and cut everything up,” she said. “Some of the clothes can be used for quilt patches. Others will make good dust cloths for our Saturday cleaning. The rest we can tear into strips to make woven rugs.”

  Now the clothes seemed a little more interesting to Lily. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a purple woven rug? Mama sat on the chair and sorted all the clothes. Lily put the sorted piles into boxes, pulling all of the purple clothes into one pile, and Papa wrote on the boxes in his neat handwriting: MAMA’S WINTER PROJECTS. Underneath that label, he wrote QUILTS or RUGS or RAGS.
r />   On one side of Mama’s chair was a growing pile of things to be thrown away. There were books that they didn’t want to keep and boxes of old newspapers. When Papa put the two guitars on the throwaway pile, Lily asked Papa if she could strum them. Just once. Papa shook his head. “I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” he said. “Doing it a little bit will only make you want to do it some more. Since we can’t keep them anyway, it’s best not to play with them at all. It will only tempt you for fancy things that we Amish don’t want to have. We believe in singing our praises to God.”

  Lily looked at the guitars in the pile. Soon, other things were piled on top and they were out of sight. How sad.

  But Lily didn’t have much time to feel sorry about the guitars. Papa brought another box over to Mama and opened it. Lily could feel her heart skip a beat when she saw what was inside. Dolls! Real dolls, with pretty faces and cute hands and feet. Some of them looked like they were sleeping until Mama picked them up and their eyes popped open. Some had long, soft hair, while others had only hair painted on their heads.

  Papa chuckled at Lily’s delight. “Looks like we found a treasure chest for our little girl.”

  Mama examined each doll. “You can choose one doll to keep, Lily. Then I’ll make Amish clothes for it. If you want one with hair, I’ll take a pair of tweezers and pluck all the hair out so that it can wear a nice covering.”

  Lily looked at all the dolls. Every single one. She tried to make up her mind over which one she wanted the most, but it was so hard to choose. They all looked so pretty. She held them in her arms to see which felt the best. She didn’t like the dolls with hard plastic bodies. She finally settled on a doll with a nice soft body that she could hug and cuddle in her arms. Its hair was painted on. Lily was afraid if she chose one with real hair, her doll would be left with a head full of little holes once Mama plucked its hair. That wouldn’t do at all.

  She held up her choice. “I’ll take this one.”

  “Let’s take it downstairs,” Mama said. “You can play with it once I have time to make it some Amish clothes to wear.”

  Lily knew what that meant. More waiting.

  Three weeks had passed since Lily’s family had moved to Pennsylvania from New York. Papa had found the equipment he needed so that he could turn off the electricity in the house. Lily was sorry that they would no longer be able to use those bright lights. She would miss hearing the pleasant hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen. But watching Papa work and being his helper took her mind off all they would miss without electricity.

  First, Papa took a little gas engine and attached it to a funny-looking gray box that had slits in it. An ice compressor, he explained to Lily. Last week, Papa had measured the space inside the freezer compartment in the top of the refrigerator. He knew an Amish man who could create a stainless steel pan to fit inside. Papa slipped it right in and smiled: a perfect fit. He moved the refrigerator forward and tipped it up while Mama slipped a rug under it. Then Papa took a firm hold on the rug and pulled the refrigerator out on the porch as Lily watched, wide-eyed.

  She followed behind him. “Why can’t you leave the refrigerator in the kitchen?”

  “This community doesn’t allow refrigerators in kitchens,” Papa said.

  “Why not?”

  Papa shrugged. “No one knows. It’s just always been that way. It probably started way back when the first refrigerator was invented.” He fit the refrigerator snugly against the house wall. “Our house is too small to have it anywhere else, unless we put it upstairs in your bedroom.” He stopped for a moment, stroking his beard, as if he were giving the matter some serious thought.

  How awful! There was barely enough room for Lily’s bed and dresser in that hallway. Joseph and Dannie galloped through like wild colts to get to their bedroom.

  Then Papa’s eyes twinkled and she knew he was teasing her. “But I don’t think there’s quite enough space up there.”

  Lily didn’t think so, either. The porch seemed like a much better place for a refrigerator than her hallway bedroom. Though, it might have been nice to be able to get some snacks during the night without going downstairs. Then she remembered her little brothers and their bottomless appetites. They would be in and out of the refrigerator in Lily’s hallway bedroom all night long. She could just see them eating leftovers from dinner in their bunk beds, getting crumbs everywhere. Soon mice would move in. Maybe a rat. She had overheard Aaron Yoder talk about killing a rat that was cat-sized.

  No. The porch would just have to make do for the refrigerator.

  On Saturday afternoon, an English stranger arrived at the house. He had a funny tool satchel and a big roll of copper pipe. He took the copper pipe and made a stack of coils that fit neatly inside the pan in the top of the refrigerator. The rest of the pipe was strung neatly beside the house and down to the ice compressor. Once everything was fastened, he told Papa, “It’s ready to try out.”

  Papa brought the garden hose up to the porch from the basement. He told Lily to turn on the faucet in the basement and wait there until he told her to turn it off.

  Lily ran to the basement and turned on the water. When she heard Papa call out to her, she quickly shut it off and ran back to see what they were doing next.

  The pan was almost filled to the top with water. The copper coils were completely immersed.

  Papa started the gas engine. Soon, the copper pipe beside the house was covered with thick white frost. He peeped into the refrigerator. “It’s working. I’ll stop the engine as soon as the pan is full of ice,” Papa said. “Mama will have a place to keep food nice and cold.”

  “Let me see,” Lily said.

  Papa hoisted her up so she could look inside the pan. There were glossy layers of fresh ice all around the copper coils.

  “Don’t ever touch that pipe,” the man said, peering over his glasses at Lily. “You would stick to it. It would be quite painful to try to get free.”

  Lily was stunned. A warning to her, of all people? The strange thing was that she was planning to lick that pipe as soon as the man left. The frost looked just like ice cream. Sometimes, she thought being grown-up meant you could read minds.

  3

  Sugar Weather

  It was the time between winter and spring. Cold at night, warm during the day. The snow that fell was soft and turned into slush piles on the way home. It was fun to walk and splash through the piles on the way home from school. Lily liked this time of year. Beth called it sugar weather.

  Lily wasn’t sure what sugar weather was. All she knew was that the children rushed home from school each afternoon so they could go sugaring. Lily loved sugar. One evening at the supper table, she asked Papa what sugar weather was. “Why don’t we go sugaring?” she said. “Everyone else is doing it.”

  Papa chuckled. “We would need to have big maple trees to go sugaring. We don’t have any.”

  Lily was disappointed. She had no idea that sugaring had something to do with trees. There were so many trees on their property. Why couldn’t they have had a sugar maple tree? Sometimes, life just didn’t seem fair.

  Several days later, Teacher Rhoda came to school with several pie pans filled with something mysterious. At noon, she set the pie pans on her desk. She took a sharp knife from her dinner bucket and began to cut whatever was in those pans into pieces.

  “We made some spotza this week,” she said. “I brought some along for all of you.”

  Children scrambled to line up. When it was Lily’s turn, she whispered to Teacher Rhoda, “What is spotza?”

  Teacher Rhoda seemed surprised that Lily didn’t know what it was. “Why, it’s sugar maple candy. From our maple trees.”

  A tree that made candy? Lily was amazed. How could Papa have not bought a house that had a candy tree? Everyone else seemed to have a candy tree.

  Lily went back to her seat and examined the candy. It was pretty. The soft amber color was almost see-through. For a fleeting moment, she thought about saving it
to share with Dannie. Maybe next time. This looked too delicious. She took a lick and . . . practically gagged. It didn’t taste very sweet. It tasted like it should have stayed on the tree.

  Lily couldn’t understand why spotza was such a big treat. The room was quiet as each student licked away at their pieces. All but Aaron Yoder. He popped the whole piece into his mouth and started chewing it. The next minute he was making funny noises. His teeth were stuck together and he couldn’t chew. Lily burst out laughing. She wished he would eat spotza every day so his mouth would be glued shut. Spotza was good for something, after all.

  Just then, Aaron started to cough and spit. He held up a bloody tooth for everyone to see, smiling like he had just won a prize.

  How disgusting! As soon as the class was dismissed for recess, she ran outside and buried the rest of her spotza deep in the snow. The last thing she wanted was to be toothless.

  A month had passed since Lily had moved to Pennsylvania. One day, during recess, she was playing pick-up sticks with the other girls as Effie leaned toward her. “Lily, when are you going to start wearing a real covering?” she whispered in that too-loud-to-be-considered-whispering voice.

  It was Lily’s turn to try to get another stick from the pile without moving any of the others, but she paused to look at Effie. And frowned. “I am wearing a real covering,” she said.

  “No, you’re not,” Effie said. “It isn’t made out of the proper fabric and the strings are too narrow. It isn’t even made the same way. It makes you look funny.”

  Like usual, Lily didn’t know how to answer Effie’s proclamations. She knew that her head covering looked different from the ones the other girls in school had. Making a Pennsylvania-style covering for Lily would have to wait until Mama had time. Mama was sewing new clothes so that they would match everyone else in this new church. Lily knew it wouldn’t be long before she had a new covering, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about it. She liked the one she had on. She’d worn that style since the day she was born. It reminded her of her happy life at Singing Tree Farm in New York.