The blessings of moving to Amish country

I wrote about the sub $200k residential listing in Teeswater the other day. A roof and a yard and so affordable almost anybody can buy it. What affordability crisis? What I neglected to mention was the many strategic benefits of moving to Mennonite country. The southern reaches of Grey and Bruce counties, most of Huron and a good part of Perth counties, plus most of Waterloo Region, have multiple old-order Amish and Mennonite communities. In trying times, these are the best neighbours you could ever wish for. When the day comes that one of our tyrannical authoritarian adversaries unleashes a cyber-attack that collapses the power grid, where do you want to be? In a 22nd floor condo in downtown Toronto? Or down the road from a guy who’s never been attached to the grid, whose children sell farm-fresh eggs, fresh-baked pies, vegetables, and farm-made summer sausage at the end of their lane (no Sunday sales, thank you very much)? I stopped in at one of those places, just outside Teeswater, because they had summer sausage on offer. The twelve year old kid asks me if I want a full one or a half. Gimme the big one, I said. The kid disappears in the back room and comes out with something that resembles a fence-post. We did some quick renegotiating. I settled for half of a quarter of the fence-post. My old pal Jim Lippert, may he rest in peace, used to be a auto-shop teacher at the same institution of learning where I was a welding teacher. We used to car-pool from Walkerton to the high school in Owen Sound. He lived in the country and had a side-gig raising chickens, that dropped enough eggs that he supplied several local restaurants. When the laying hens wore out, he’d swap them to an Amish family for a stack of fresh-baked pies. We’d drop off three dozen hens on the way to work, and pick up half-a-dozen pies on the way home. By then every one of those hens was cooked, dressed, and pickled. Like most old-order families, these folks also ran a home business in addition to farming their 100 acre spread. In this case, a sawmill. Lippert was close enough to these folks that he felt comfortable taking me around back to see the operation for myself. In one of my past lives I used to do maintenance welding at sawmills on Vancouver Island, so I know from sawmills. I’d never in my life seen anything like I saw in Zook’s back yard. The biggest draught horse you’ve ever seen in your life is walking around in circles all day, attached to a giant wheel that in turn drives innumerable shafts and pulleys, which in turn drive, among many other things, a saw blade that would be at home in any industrial West Coast sawmill. Zook’s workforce seems to be mostly barefoot teenage boys in straw hats. Zook’s operation ain’t gonna miss a beat when the grid goes down. I rest my case.