back to Issue 18
by Dale Scherfling
Jacob was Amish, mostly. He still wore the hat, still didn’t drive, still called his wife “Mama”—a sacred nickname passed down through men who understood some words hold more than one meaning. But he also sold firewood, splitting kindling with a cordless drill fitted with a screw cone, and watched the Cleveland baseball team—they weren’t yet the Guardians—on the “watching machine” in the office next door when he thought nobody was looking.
I learned this over three years photographing in Wellington, Ohio—not quite Holmes County Amish Country but close enough that buggies still clip-clopped down Main Street on Fridays, and the hardware store kept a hitching post out front that actually got used. I shot down there often while working for the Lorain Journal.
I was English—that’s what they called us outsiders—and I’d worked hard to earn the kind of trust that let me keep my camera around my neck without making people turn away. I kept my hands in my pockets when I talked. I asked before I shot. And I never, ever published a face without permission.
That’s how I got to know Jacob.
They came into town every Friday—Jacob and Mama, whose given name I never learned. She didn’t offer it, and I didn’t ask. Some boundaries you don’t cross, even after three years. Jacob sold jams and furniture from his woodshop. Mama sold handmade potholders stitched with Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs and sharpened her tongue on him like a blade on a whetstone.
“Jacob, mind your mouth,” she said one afternoon, thwapping him on the arm as he reached for another hot pretzel from the vendor two stalls down.
“I’m mindin’ it,” he said, licking mustard off his thumb, that glint already forming in his eye. “Just sayin’—Mama, let’s go home and plow.”
She smacked him again, but she was laughing this time, a sound like wind chimes made of silver spoons. He said it loud enough that the lady at the kettle corn stand dropped a scoop. A businessman in a suit pretended he hadn’t heard, suddenly fascinated by his phone.
I must have looked confused, because Jacob caught my eye and grinned.
“That’s what we say,” he told me later, when Mama had wandered off to examine fabric at the next booth. His face was straight as Sunday service. “When a man’s hungry and the fields are dry. And the woman’s wearin’ that apron just so.”
He winked like we were co-conspirators in some ancient joke that transcended the gulf between his world and mine.
I’d been documenting the Amish presence in Lorain County for a book I was working on—or trying to work on. Honestly, I’d been stuck for months. Every photograph felt like anthropology, every caption like I was pinning butterflies to a board. Beautiful, maybe. True, certainly. But lifeless.
Jacob changed that.
They came back the next Friday—same jokes, same smacks, same wink. She called him a dog, and he called her his tractor. And I swear I’ve never seen two people more in love. Not in that performative way couples have when they know someone’s watching. This was different—love that had outlasted thirty-some years of shared labor, shared faith, and beds that had to be made at dawn no matter how little sleep they’d gotten.
I started looking forward to Fridays.
“You ever gonna take our picture?” Jacob asked one afternoon in October, when the light was turning gold and the air smelled of cider and wood smoke.
“I can’t,” I said. “Not faces. You know that.”
“’Course I know that.” He adjusted his hat, still grinning. “I meant our hands. Mama’s got good hands. Strong hands. Spent a lifetime weavin’ and kneadin’ and workin’. That’s a picture worth takin’, ain’t it?”
So I did. I photographed their hands—his scarred and thick-knuckled from woodworking, hers smaller but just as weathered, fingers that had sewn ten thousand stitches and peeled ten thousand potatoes. I shot them holding a jar of blackberry jam between them, both sets of fingers touching the glass. The light caught the purple depths of the preserve and turned their skin to burnished copper.
It became the cover of my book.
But that came later.
In November, they missed a Friday. Then another. Wellington felt emptier somehow, the market less alive. I asked around, trying not to seem too concerned, trying to remember I was supposed to be a documentarian, not a friend.
“They moved,” someone finally told me. “Off grid, I heard. Solar panels and such. Not too far, but far enough.”
I felt something sink in my chest. Not grief, exactly. But loss.
Three weeks before Christmas, I was packing up my gear after a long day of shooting when I heard it—that familiar clip-clop of hooves on asphalt. I turned, and there was Jacob, reins in hand, Mama beside him with a quilt across her lap.
“Thought you’d left,” I said.
“Did,” Jacob said. “But we came back to bring you somethin’.”
Mama handed down a package wrapped in brown paper and twine. Inside was a potholder—deep blue with a white star in the center—and a jar of jam.
“For your book,” she said quietly. “Jacob told me about the picture—how you caught our hands like they were prayin’ over the jar.”
I didn’t know what to say. In three years, she’d never spoken more than ten words directly to me.
“Thank you,” I managed.
Jacob tipped his hat, and that glint came back into his eye one last time. He looked at Mama, then at me, and the grin spread across his weathered face like sunrise.
“Well, Mama,” he said, loud enough for the whole empty street to hear. “Let’s go home and plow.”
She swatted him with her mitten, laughing that silver-spoon laugh, and they clip-clopped away into the early winter dark.
I never saw them again.
But every time I use that potholder—which is often, because it’s the best one I own—I think about the space between worlds. How sometimes a joke is a prayer. How love is its own language, spoken in a thousand small moments across a thousand small Fridays. How being seen, really seen, might be the holiest gift we can give each other.
And how some people know exactly who they are—no apologies, no explanations—just hungry fields and good soil and the promise of going home together when the work is done.
Dale Scherfling’s work has been accepted by Does It Have Pockets, Yellow Mama, Close2theBone, Lost Blonde Literary, Flash Phantom, Third Act Magazine, and The Blotter Magazine. He writes from the American Midwest.