Today
When my phone rings outside of my normal business hours, 10 PM to 6 AM, it usually means either a baby is on the way or something bad happened. At 5 AM today it was the latter. One of our closest Amish friends was calling because the barns at her parent’s place were burning so I ran her and her husband down, setting off a chain reaction of driving around and around all day.
They lost two barns but saved their “company shed” which is good because they use those sheds for weddings and their youngest girl is getting married in a few months, and a bunch of her wedding stuff was in the shed.
It could have been worse, the cattle in the barn were able to get out and their horses weren’t in the barn either. A mom cat lost a litter of kittens and this poor guy got the pads of his feet badly burned and his whiskers melted.
By this afternoon it was pretty much all cleaned up, dozens of Amish showed up all day to clean, take down the concrete walls that were damaged by fire, provide food and drinks for the Amish workers and the English firefighters. When I left an hour ago they were already halfway done replacing the siding on the shed and the forms were up for concrete, the first truck was already pouring. If you had paid people to do that work it would have been tens of thousands of dollars, they did it all for free (except for materials of course) and it would have taken weeks.
By this weekend the barns will be rebuilt completely.
They have their flaws, as do all people, but when it comes to helping out in a crisis the Amish are tough to beat.
As White people we have the capacity to live together and share that level of commitment to one another, our history proves this. Someone has done a good job of convincing us this is bad, it's obvious as to why, bonded together like that makes us invincible.
One day we will come back together.
Appreciate that positive piece.