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that Kristie and then Cara had rented prior to their marriages. I was sleeping in the bedroom directly above Jake’s bedroom, occupying one of the rooms on the second floor of the grossdawdy haus .
    Jake’s grandparents had originally lived here when they retired from the main responsibility for the farm, turning both the farm and the main house over to John, Mary, and their family. The senior Zooks had been killed several years ago in a buggy-car accident, something that used to be a much more frequent occurrence before the Amish began putting reflective triangles and blinking lights powered by batteries on the back of their buggies. They also added bicycle reflectors around the two sides and top of the buggies, sprinkled there much as the blood of lambs must have been sprinkled on the doorposts and lintels of the Israelites in ancient Egypt. Now on a dark night, a driver had warning before he was suddenly on top of the slow-moving buggies.
    The grossdawdy haus had a small living room, bedroom, kitchen, and bath on Jake’s level. On my level were two good-sized rooms—the bedroom I was in and a living room—and a small bath.
    I knew that when Jake had come home from the rehab facility after his accident, his parents had realized he’d never be Plain again. The need to accommodate their injured son had caused them to play mental tag with the Ordnung , the oral collection of laws that govern Amish society. They had brought in electricity and phone service to this wing of their home, providing exactly what Jake needed: privacy and convenience with help as close as his parents in the main body of the house. Since the electricity and phone didn’t go into the main house, Mary and John hadn’t actually broken the Ordnung , though a legalist could argue that they had bent it a fair amount.
    The thing that always fascinated me about the Ordnung was that it was both elastic and brittle. It changed constantly as the bishops regularly evaluated modern life to see if new inventions and products would aid or disrupt family and church. Seen as acceptable were John’s weather forecaster in the barn and the iron wheeled tractor he drove in the barnyard. But if he drove that tractor into the fields or if he traded that forecaster for a regular radio, he would be in big trouble with the church authorities.
    Accommodation, I thought. Yet these hair-splitting laws weren’t arbitrary, even though they frequently seemed so to us fancy folk. They were designed to preserve family and church, to insure the well-being of the community as opposed to the tastes of the individual.
    Tractors in the field made the small Amish farms too small to be family undertakings. Children wouldn’t be needed to work alongside and be trained by their fathers. Grown sons and daughters would have to go elsewhere to seek employment. Family would disintegrate.
    Radios brought godless music, vain teachings, and the outside world to a people who believed their closed community was God’s chosen way. The unvetted ideas, greed, and individuality promoted on the airwaves were certain to overwhelm the People unless the very presence of these dangers was forbidden.
    If the Ordnung was broken and the community was threatened, it was serious indeed. It was sin and a shunnable offense.
    I snuggled down further under the quilt and thought of Jake somewhere in the rooms below me. For reasons of his own, he’d rejected the Ordnung and the Plain life. When he’d begun his teenage rebellion, his rumspringa , he’d not stopped until his motorcycle landed on his back. And even then, he’d continued to rebel in his heart.
    I sighed. Jake and his complexities were more than I could deal with this morning, at least before a shower and a cup of coffee. I glanced at the window again and could see rime about the edges of the glass, crystal shards growing across the pane in an intricate and beautiful pattern. I shivered. The room was frigid with a late November chill since in the