On the road again, here’s Iowa somewhere between Iowa City and Des Moines. I’d like to say Iowa is more exciting than this, but that might be an exaggeration.
I took a walk around the Cedar Falls neighborhood this morning, and I noticed a crew starting to strip off the shingles on the roof. The thing that struck me was they were wearing old-fashioned jeans and shirts, and they all had those Abe Lincoln beards. And they were all white, which is more common in Iowa, I suppose. Amish? I wondered….
Amish it apparently was. My dad told me that it’s pretty common to get Amish folk around here to do projects like roofing, siding, floors, etc. To quote my father: “They do good work and they work for cheap. Some of them don’t drive though, so you have to pick them up. They sing hymns while they work.”
They might also be Dunkards, aka German Baptists or Church of the Brethren. We saw them quite a bit in Indiana. They frequently do carpentry as part of their orthodox beliefs, I understand, to continue the work of Jesus (literally).
He needs to record the hymns and then do a pod-cast!
There are sizeable Amish communities around here (Western IL and Iowa). I often see Amish at the coffee shops in town, and I run past a few Amish farms.