Ring the Bell
I drove down the blacktop road, my car filled with lively Amish children, nine-year-old Leah in the front seat with three little boys—4, 5, and 6– in the back. I had everyone strapped in, the seat belts almost strangling them, but the atmosphere in the car was celebratory, the children giggling and squiggling against their restraints. We were off to tell the grandparents and great-grandparents the good news of the day.
I am not a regular driver for the Amish, someone who makes her living taking them to dentist appointments or special shopping trips. Rather, I am a neighbor who helps out in emergencies. My calls usually center around broken machinery, serious illness, injury or death. Just two years ago, I drove this same route around the countryside bearing the news of a stillborn for this very same family. I pulled into the lanes of the grandparents, then the uncles and aunts, informing them of the tragic loss.
Without phones, computers, internet, texting or messaging, news—good or bad–is usually delivered here face-to-face. I am so often the intermediary in these communications that the Amish have dubbed my little black Rav-4 “the death car.” Today, I had good news, but I knew that when some of the Amish saw my Toyota, they would only anticipate the worst.
The fields were almost harvested, combines still moving through the corn, the wagons filling with grain. I came up behind a buggy and stayed there. I crept along at a low speed up the hill, the red, triangular slow-moving vehicle sign on the buggy catching the rays of the sun, seemingly blinking off and on all by itself. I didn’t want to pass until I was certain there wasn’t another vehicle approaching in the opposite lane. We rolled into Sharon Center (population 65), gliding toward the area’s only four-way stop, and heading west to the grandparents’ house.
Earlier that brisk November morning, a loud knock at my door set off my dog’s protective barking. On my front stoop, Leah and her brothers stood in front of their horse and cart tied to the porch railing.
“Birthday, birthday,” Leah had said. The oldest of the siblings, Leah was fluent in English, while her younger brothers only spoke Deitsch.
“Uh, oh, did I miss someone’s birthday?”
“No, birthday,” Leah said. “I need to ring the bell.”
I invite every child in the neighborhood to come to my home, a converted one-room Amish schoolhouse, to ring the bell on his or her birthday. The number of rings equals the age of the child. One. ..two. . .three. The child pulls the heavy rope threading through the ceiling to the cupola that holds the old school bell. Sometimes the force of the bell lifts the younger children right off their feet and into the air, their hands gripping the rope. A parent often steps in to offer assistance. Everyone calls out the rings. Four . . .five . . .six. Then we sing “Happy Birthday” and I hand out cookies all around.
I motioned Leah into the house. “How old are you?”
“I’m nine.”
“Nine pulls of the rope, then.
“I’ll pull nine times, but it isn’t my birthday.”
“No? When’s your birthday?” I keep a list of neighborhood birthdays on my refrigerator, and I regretted not remembering Leah’s.
“Oh, my birthday is in the summer, in June.”
Now I was confused. But maybe Leah got tired of waiting for her birthday, so here she was, ringing the bell a good six months in advance.
In the last few years, the number of children in the neighborhood had increased exponentially. It had been difficult to keep up. In the past, I prided myself on learning the names and understanding the personalities of the young people surrounding me. I had grown up in a small town where no one seemed to know my name. Most just called me “Nellie Lynch’s granddaughter.” Years later, when I returned for the town sesquicentennial, I wrote that very thing on my name tag and most townspeople simply nodded as if to say, “Got it.”
In Buggy Land, I wanted to relate to the children as individuals and not simply part of the family blob. I’ve even heard the children themselves comment upon my efforts.
“She even knows our names, where we fall in the family, and who looks like which parent.”
The whole tradition began years ago when we had the schoolhouse reunion. Whole families appeared in my pasture with three generations squished in a buggy. Each branch of the family had once attended school in my house. For the reunion picnic, they brought fried chicken, potato salad, and pictures from their school days.
The school closed around 1980 and the county sold off everything inside the building—all the desks, books, supplies, even the blackboard. Then on the outside, the county sold the merry-go-round and even the bell. They couldn’t get the bell out of the cupola, so they just took down the whole thing and patched the roof. The bell went for a steep price and the cupola went to the burn pile.
I approached the local Amish carpenter, asking if he could recreate the cupola.
“Do you have a bell?”
I explained that I was searching for one, but hadn’t had any luck so far.
“You find a bell and I’ll make the cupola,” the carpenter said.
I told him he could use the old picture of the schoolhouse that had turned up at the reunion for a model.
“Oh, I went to school there. I can remember exactly what it all looked like.”
I drove all over the state looking for a bell and finally found one that was within my budget at a flea market in Des Moines.
Then it was an exciting day when the carpenter drove into my yard, his tractor pulling a wagon with my new cupola. His whole family gathered in lawn chairs to watch the cupola lifted onto the roof by a crane, the bell mounted, the hole for the rope drilled.
“And when are you going to ring the bell?” the carpenter asked.
“Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, Easter,” I said. “The Fourth of July. And did I say Thanksgiving?”
The carpenter shook his head at this silly English woman who would go to this expense–all for a bell.
“And,” I motioned toward the carpenter’s six children, “anytime a neighbor child has a birthday.”
The carpenter’s children leaned against the garage and beamed.
And the custom was established.
So, why couldn’t I remember Leah’s birthday? And why had she arrived six months early?
“It’s not my birthday,” Leah repeated. “It’s my new baby brother’s. He was born last night. He has brownish hair and very long fingers and toes.”
Leah explained that she was ringing the bell to let all the other relatives in the neighborhood know that her brother had been born. Healthy.
“It’s his birthday, she said.
Her grandparents were out of earshot, so she asked me to drive her there to inform them.
My little black car kicked up a trail of dust from the road. Just beyond Sharon Center, Leah shouted, Wait, that’s my Uncle Harry.” I pulled over to the side of the road and Harry called “Whoa” to his horse. His eyes met mine and his forehead wrinkled, bracing himself for heartbreak. Leah and her brothers danced out into the road and told Harry of the birth.
“Oh, you don’t say!” Relief flooded his face.
“His name is Nathan,” Leah called from the car window, the Toyota speeding away.
Then we found the grandparents in their front yard.
“We call him Candy Dawdy,” Leah said. “He sticks a sucker in our hands and says, ‘Do you want some candy?’”
I stopped the car. Candy Dawdy recognized me and shook his head no. He didn’t want to hear about any more misfortune. But the children spilled out of the car and told him the good news.
He smiled, then looked over at me. “You were here a couple of years ago with a different story.”
We were off to tell today’s story to the uncles and aunts, to other relatives hidden down in hollows or perched on top of hills. We visited large white square Amish homes and small mobile homes. We sat on the steps of grandpa, or dawdy houses, and petted puppies while we spread the news. We met more uncles and cousins on the road.
“His name is Nathan,” Leah repeated over and over again, and this repetition, this confirmation of a new life, didn’t erase the lost child, but it did fill the gap in our hearts with joy and gratitude.
Then we headed home to see the beautiful new baby. Who did have long fingers and toes.
A paid subscription to this Substack page goes directly to AgArts, a non-profit that imagines and promotes healthy food systems through the arts. In this giving season, please help our work.
Mary Swander is a proud member of the Iowa Writers Collaborative.
On December 13, from 5-8 p.m., members of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative will hold our annual holiday party for paid subscribers and donors to Iowa Capital Dispatch. (Their guests can attend for a donation to be given at the event). Come mix and mingle with our writers, and readers.
The Tom and Ruth Harkin Center, home of the Harkin Institute for Public Policy & Citizen Engagement at Drake University, is a model of inclusion and accessibility to public policy research and citizen engagement.
Paid subscribers: Click here to register.
Follow the writing of Iowa Writers Collaborative through the Sunday Round-Up.
Enjoyed your story and must tell you as it reminded me…. Three preschool neighbor kids knocked on the door to tell me that had a new baby brother. Named Michael Patrick. My twelve year old son ask in seriousness, ‘What’s his last name?” They looked at each other and said they didn’t know. So he explained how he had their same last name, because he was part of their family. They were so excited they quickly left to run home and tell their dad!
Nothing about being a subscriber to the Collaborative gives me as much joy as stories from Buggy Land. Your words bring a better world to life. Thank you.