Crossing Over by Ruth Irene Garrett Page A

creativity.
    I vowed I would never paddle a child, and in truth, I never needed to. When a teacher treats students with respect and admiration, the students usually respond in kind. At least they do in Amish schools. At least they did with me.
    Teaching school gave me a sense of purpose and less time to think about my growing affection for Ottie. But in my weaker moments, I would let my guard down and my mind would wander.
    Ottie didn’t make it any easier. He began bringing me gifts from the road, including beautiful—and expensive—crystal swans.
    I’d hide the swans in my chest of drawers; certainly, my parents would consider them inappropriate gifts. But just like my feelings for Ottie, I knew where the swans were.
    They were never more than an inch or two from my heart.

Eight
    Ottie, how could you do this to us? . . . You took her so she could not keep her promise to teach school again and her promise to the church on bended knees. We took you in as a trusted friend, tried to help you in time of sickness, and trusted you as a friend. Now you proved yourself not worthy of the trust at the cost of our darling daughter Irene.
    â€”L ETTER FROM M OM
    K alona is the kind of place where everyone knows everyone else’s business and, even if they don’t, they want to. It’s a place where neighbors know who the owner is when a dog barks, where Midwestern values—and provincialism—are protected fiercely.
    It’s also a tourist landing where thousands alight each year to see the Amish farms on the town’s outskirts—and the more modest Amish dwellings within the city limits, where horses graze in the fenced backyards of some homes.
    People come for the three-day quilt show and sale in late April, the Kalona Fall Festival in September, and the Kalona Historical Village, a collection of restored nineteenth-century buildings. Every Monday, they venture to the Kalona Sales Barn, where the proprietors offer horses, cows, sheep, and the like.
    There are the downtown staples like Reif’s Family Center, Yotty’s Hardware, and the weekly Kalona News, and the quaint-sounding businesses like Miller’s Medicine Cabinet, the Wooden Wheel quilt shop, and Ellen’s Sewing Center. A stone’s throw from the sales barn is Kalona Blacksmith & Welding, where the owner hangs a metal sign by the front door when he leaves. “Out on call,” it says.
    Just outside town, people can buy curds and such from the Kalona Cheese Factory, which proudly claims it will ship anywhere.
    Hills Bank has a diminutive white clock tower that nevertheless is the tallest structure in town. If that’s not enough to keep people on time, an air-raid siren goes off at noon every day. People set their clocks by it, especially the Amish, whose timepieces are powered by batteries or pendulum.
    Visitors are just as apt to see an Amish buggy and horse affixed to a hitching rail as they are a car parked in one of the downtown’s diagonal spaces. In Kalona, the natives like to say, the English and Amish coexist harmoniously, one living in the twenty-first century, the other a hundred or more years in the past.
    Residents call it the heart of Iowa’s Amish country, and boast that the seven hundred Amish inhabitants make up the largest such settlement west of the Mississippi. The town also goes by another moniker: “Quilt Capital of Iowa.”
    The Amish were the first to settle in Kalona, arriving along the banks of the English River (oddly enough) in 1846. The area was nameless then. In 1879, it became Bulltown, after a successful shorthorn breeding service. Later, it became Kalona, the name of the service’s famous registered sire.
    It was a truly bucolic, out-of-the-way burb until the 1950s, when Highway 1 was paved, providing easier access to and from Iowa City. Ottie says construction crews used creek gravel in the pavement mix; hence, the unusual pink hue.
    The highway brought more