Amish Contrast in the Modern World

The contrast of the modern on the old is quite high in Holmes County, Ohio, just like the contrast of black on white in this photograph.  Here, the old world and the new operate side by side, Amish living separate lives, dispersed among the English of the county, and sharing the roads and towns as if there were nothing unusual about the contrast between the old world and the new.  We who have lived in this part of Ohio don’t even notice the contrast any more.  There seems to be nothing improbable about the seventeenth century and the twenty-first being finely interlaced.  The integration of cultures is so successful that we are not surprised to crest a hill on a snowy lane and find a horse pulling a wagon loaded with sacks of grain.  We were out that day in an SUV with four-wheel drive because we thought that was the only way to drive through the deep snow.  Guess we were wrong.