lp and they fail a lot. The failures and the unsuccessful attempts don’t count, they are just practice, it’s the little successes that are celebrated. The children love the sense of achievement, the praise from parents and older siblings. They grow up bold and confident, and it showed at the barn raising.
There are no people in their world trying to protect turf, to discourage them for fear of them taking their jobs. There is more work to be done in this world than we can accomplish. Their problem is distinguishing what is worthwhile and what isn’t. They also learn to ask, “What good will come of this?”, and they get answers.
An M.D. who came to watch the barn raising admitted that he carried a lot more than just a black bag (if he owned one) in the back of his stationwagon that morning, but was grateful his services were not needed.
By mid-afternoon, most of the workers were picking up their tools, and the youngsters were busy cleaning up around the job site. There were a few pieces of hardware to be installed, and some trim painting to be done, but that would have to wait until drier weather. I felt that I had witnessed a miracle, at least a victory for the human spirit.
Without power tools*, these farm community neighbors had raised a barn in less than a day and had enjoyed every minute of it. A solid timber frame barn on a solid foundation, that if properly cared for will last at least the three hundred years that Amish built barns have stood in Pennsylvania.
*An ironic note to this story is that Danny’s father, Bill Hostetler, ran a community hardware store on the home farm. Here, six miles from the nearest village with a hardware store, it saved those of us in the Nunda community a lot of running around when a bolt or such broke. A little price shopping revealed he wasn’t charging the markup that some of the hardware chains were. But with the boys running the farm and his own woodworking shop in the hardware building, he was happy, and we appreciated it.
However, when his supplier was bought out by a large corporation, they gave Bill a minimum figure in dollars that he had to buy before they would ship to him. Since he was non-electric and didn’t buy power-tools and other electric items, he couldn’t possibly meet their demands and had to close the hardware business last week.