the carved box and my baby quilt over the other. When I turned my head, his old beater was easing its way into the stream of traffic.
Eight hours later I rolled the same bag through the Philly airport, imagining Mama and Dad there twenty-six years before with me in their arms. For the first time I wondered why they met my birth grandmother at the airport and not a lawyer’s office or her home or their hotel. Where did they stay when they were in Philly? Downtown? Out by the airport? How long were they here? Did they see the Liberty Bell? Independence Hall? Who held me on the plane?
An hour later I was sailing past the Philly suburbs, heading west on the Expressway in my Ford Taurus rental car. Patches of snow, with blooming crocuses poking out, hid in the shadows at the side of the road. The river to my right ran high and muddy. The bare trees along the hillsides hung heavy with vines.
“I’m in Pennsylvania,” I said out loud, and then I wondered if Dad would have come with me if I had asked him to a couple of years ago. I turned up the radio to drown out my sorrow.
I’d decided to get off of the Turnpike at Valley Forge and take the back roads the rest of the way to Lancaster County because one of the guidebooks I’d skimmed had recommended it for a better view of the countryside. At first that made for slower going, with far more lights and traffic than countryside, but eventually the congestion lessened and the scenery improved.
I nearly slammed on my brakes at the sight of my first Amish farm. A man drove a team of four mules pulling a plow through a field. He wore a straw hat, cobalt blue shirt, black trousers, and suspenders. A woman and a girl, both wearing dresses out of the same blue material, black aprons, and white bonnets, bent low in a garden plot. Two barefoot toddlers played in the grass. As the scene went by, a line full of clothes flapped in the breeze, the white house and barn both backdrops to the colorful display. Soon I was driving forty miles an hour with a line of cars behind me. The farms were immaculate. Tidy fields. Trimmed lawns that looked robust even in the early spring. Gardens newly planted or being planted. White houses and barns. Clothesline after clothesline, usually strung by sturdy pulleys from the back porch to the barn, of solid-color shirts and dresses in maroon, forest green, and blue. And black pants, aprons, and white bonnets. It dawned on me it was Monday. Wash day. Tuesday was ironing and gardening. Wednesday was sewing and Thursday market day. Friday was cleaning, Saturday baking, and Sunday the day of rest. It was all spelled out in the song “Here We Go Around the Mulberry Bush,” which I use to chant. I was seven before I realized Mama ran our house on the same schedule.
The matching clothes, immaculate farms, and whitewashed houses and barns had a stylized appeal. I liked things uniform. It appealed to, as James would say, my sterile sense of decor. But none of it was sterile. It was all very much alive. The people. The scents wafting through my open window. The vibrant colors snapping on the lines. It was orderly and patterned and obviously it all had a purpose.
Ahead, along the busy road, a group of children walked, swinging black lunch pails that looked like what Dad used to take out to the orchard when he was too busy to come in for lunch. Two girls skipped. A boy kicked a rock. The car behind me honked. My speed had dropped to thirty. I accelerated before a corner, and then this time I did slam on my brakes. Ahead, in the middle of the lane, was a black buggy with a gray roof and an orange caution triangle on the back. Now I had an excuse to go slow.
I passed a one-room school where a young woman swept the porch. Walking ahead was a mother holding a young child’s hand with a baby on her hip. As I passed them, I saw a boy on a bicycle-like scooter weaving along the shoulder of the road. The car behind me passed my rental and the carriage, which, surprisingly, clipped along at twenty-five miles an hour. Ahead was a straight stretch, so I passed the carriage too,