Wild Amish Nights!

Wild nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury! -- Emily Dickinson

A snapshot of an evening in Outer Podunk:

I'm outside shoveling mole hills out of my lawn. (Lest you think I'm the one having anything approaching a wild night.) No happy, Wind in the Willows thoughts about my furry little subterranean neighbors; in fact, no happy thoughts at all, because the lawn is a mess and needs to be professionally reseeded, and I don't want to invest the money in that project because it's money better spent fixing my house, and I hate my house because it's not really my house as in a house I would have chosen to purchase myself, it's just my parents' house that I'm now the unproud co-owner of, and it's slowly falling apart, and I want to move because living here is driving me crazy, and why is it that I wind up having all these damn problems I have to fix by myself anyway. One of those "Grrrrr" kind of days. So I'm stomping on mole tunnels and scraping off the hills with a particularly vicious vigor.

My dark ruminations are interrupted by a clip-clop of horse's hooves on the road. Many of our local Amish hire out as roofers and construction workers, and the local public access is also a popular Amish teenage hangout, so it's not unusual to have buggies rolling through the neighborhood. But then the clip-clop becomes irregular, then stops, then starts again, haltingly, and when I look up I see an Amish buggy weaving unsteadily up the road, the horse looking positively perplexed by the pull of the reins, or lack thereof. ("Done with the compass, Done with the chart...") Getting a better look inside the buggy, I see...a young couple engaged in a passionate kiss, temporarily oblivious to their navigational problems.

Good for you, I think. Good for you, you wild and crazy kids.

I even find myself grinning.