The Amish Midwife - By Mindy Starns Clark Page 0,23

up a house. I’d already hired a caretaker for the orchard, a man in the community who was working for another orchardist. He assured me he would spray for eastern filbert blight in a week or two and continue to prune the trees as he had time. Soon he would need to groom and level the ground, preparing it for harvest. He came highly recommended, and I trusted he would follow through with caring for the orchard.

I constantly thought about what I should do with the house and property and decided to at least gather information. A place with a thirty-acre orchard and another ninety acres in farmland had sold the year before at a good price, but I only had forty acres.

The Realtor, Darci, seemed to appreciate the house, which had been built in 1911. It was a simple structure with three bedrooms and one bath, but all of the old-growth woodwork was original and in good condition, as was the banister along the stairs. She said new window coverings and paint would help but weren’t necessary. She didn’t say anything about the kitchen, which needed to be redone, but the right buyers could do it themselves. She did notice where the foundation was crumbling and said that would probably be a costly and necessary fix.

I told her I was just gathering information, that I wanted to know how much the property was worth and then I would decide about putting it on the market.

She’d already run some comps and quoted me a price. It was less than what I had anticipated, but Dad’s mortgage had long been paid off, and all I had to worry about were taxes. If all went well, the hazelnut crop was usually good, although there were certainly years when it hadn’t been thanks to freak storms, droughts, blights, and the other everyday threats farmers have to deal with. The sale of the hazelnuts would more than cover the costs of maintaining the place, so I didn’t have to be in a rush.

I told her I would think about it and maybe get back to her in a month or two, but probably not until I returned in the fall. She made sure she had my cell number, and I took her card.

I walked through the orchard then, one last time. The loamy scent of earth and rain rose up from the soft ground. The buds were just beginning to swell and the branches created the structure of a tunnel over my head. In another month it would be a canopy of shady leaves. A movement danced ahead at the end of the row, and for a minute I thought, Dad! The image in my mind was clear—his weathered face, white hair, straw hat, and rounded-toe boots. But when I reached the last row, I found the shadow of a poplar tree manipulated by the breeze. I turned and walked back to the house, seeing myself among the trunks of the trees. A toddler squatting on the ground, playing with a stick. A five-year-old with my doll. An eight-year-old mourning Mama. A ten-year-old climbing a tree. A teenager helping Dad with the pruning, fertilizing, and spraying. I’d grown up in this orchard. It was home as much as the house.

I stopped by the coffee shop to check the adoption site I’d registered on but found no response. I definitely needed more information to conduct a thorough search—such as the name of my birth mother. I’d tried a couple of weeks ago to get a copy of my original birth certificate with no success. I was told that without the consent of my birth mother, the certificate couldn’t be released, but once I was in Pennsylvania I could go to the department of vital records in Harrisburg and make another request. Even if they blacked out the name of my birth mother, I still wanted a copy. Maybe they would leave my original name intact. I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask again—and maybe someone would take pity on me if I did it in person.

Over the last two weeks I had called all seven of the hospitals I’d located on the Internet in Montgomery County, but every one of the records department clerks I spoke with said they couldn’t help me. My biological mom could make a request, but I couldn’t. I also came across a Pennsylvania law that allowed adoptees to write a letter to the court of the county they were born