Amish Children Have a Safe Harbor

Do you remember walking home from school?  Do you remember what you wore, or what you carried?  I remember the books – always so heavy.  I remember the homework, even in grade school.  Mostly, I remember the certainty I had, at that age, that this would never change.  I’d somehow always be in school.

But here are three kids walking home from school, knowing the opposite - that this will soon end.  After the eighth grade (or the age of sixteen), Amish children don’t attend any school at all.  Their day arrives, and they walk home for good.  School was only something they did while they were still young. 

I think there is a profound sense of anchored-in-harbor tranquility displayed in this photograph.  It is foreign to everything I personally have known.  We have careers, life-long goals, and ambitions in the modern world, and many of us stay in school for a very long time.  I’m not saying that that’s a bad thing at all, but do you catch yourself wondering what it must be like for these children?  What it must be like to live Amish?  I do.  I guess that’s why I write.