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Amish
by Tatiana Ryckman I don’t love apple butter, but other people do. They drive from all over the heart-shaped state I’m from to stop in shitty towns like the one I grew up in to eat it. But I remember apple butter only for its infinite ability to disappoint through its total dissimilarity to actual butter. People carted themselves into my town or one neighboring and settled into the plastic booth seat of an Amish restaurant with little unironic jars of jams and spreads sitting atop each wooden table. I was fooled repeatedly by these jars. Mislead and made to believe in the pure Amish goodness of them. The peanut-butter mixed with honey was delicious. The homemade strawberry jam was excellent. But apple butter, that mysterious black paste, couldn’t be trusted. Yet I kept coming back for the butter of it, every time failing the weird self-assigned test of goodness, of Amish-ability-ness. At that time I went through phases of wanting to belong in that monochromatic world, to prove that I could live happily without electricity and multicolored clothes and thereby avoid all life obstacles—as if that short list covered the gamut of human suffering. I would be smarter and nicer if I were Amish, but I held at the same time the distinct belief that they lived in too different a world; just a few hills and winding roads away, but distinctly inaccessible to the likes of me. It was as if they could see with their acetic wisdom the blackness of my child’s heart through my light pink dress. And sometimes, in the grocery store, I would see their carts loaded—not with the high fiber cereal and vegetables that I was forced to eat, and that I’d expected and decided was what they wanted and deserved, no—they had Lucky Charms and Doritos. I was blindsided with a misdirected jealousy. I was not allowed to have Lucky Charms or Doritos. I had electricity and they had apple butter—we each had our own unique pleasures and I couldn’t find room for this dietary spilling over into my secular existence. Were my luxuries responsible for my lack of sugary cereals? Had the Amish earned them by riding horse-drawn buggies? I searched their grocery store carts and jars of preserves for the place where we might intersect, but couldn’t find it. I never considered that it might be our humanness, our fallibility, our mortality. It’s easy to blame that oversight on a child’s lack of perspective, but there’s no guarantee I could stomach apple butter any better today. |
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