LITMIR.BIZ

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was well arranged. On the table next to the comfy-looking dark blue sofa was a stack of zoo and animal magazines, and the calendar on the wall had a picture of zebra in the snow for the month of November.

      “Josh had his friend Hank fill me in on the phone about you, Lydia, but I’d love to hear your take on everything,” Sandra said. “I’d be happy to help you try to trace your biological roots and take in trade anything you can tell me about an Amish Christmas here in Eden County. Not that Josh and I didn’t have some go-arounds about that, but women see things a lot differently from men.”

      Sandra gave Josh a playful punch in his midriff, which Lydia figured was a lot more intimate than a punch to his arm. Oh, well. She had to work with and get along with this woman. And if these two still meant something to each other, Lydia had to accept that, at least for now.

      “I don’t even have names to start tracing,” she admitted as Josh sat in his chair and the two women took the sofa, facing each other. “But there has to be a newspaper record of my parents’ deaths, because car-buggy accidents are always written up. I do know the week they died because I was ten days old. It was the second week of February 1992.”

      “You mean you weren’t even told your parents’ names?”

      “It was— I just sensed it was difficult to ask. As if I would be disloyal if I did. Actually, I did ask once and Mamm said that she and Daad were my real parents now, so I got that message loud and clear. I didn’t want to upset her more and wanted Daad to know I loved and trusted him—which I do,” she added hastily.

      Sandra raised an eyebrow at Josh. “Well, more of a mystery, then, though I’ve seen other situations where key information had been lost or even lied about. I can check the database archive from the Cleveland Plain Dealer online if it goes back that far, but is there a more local paper?”

      Josh put in, “Homestead has a weekly paper but it’s only about nine years old. We’d need to go into Wooster in the next county to check on articles from the Daily Record.”

      We’d need to go? Lydia thought. Was Josh going to help Sandra? But this was his busiest time for the Christmas animals. Or did he automatically think of himself and Sandra as a team?

      “Is there any way you could go to Wooster with me now?” Sandra asked Lydia. “I saw a mileage sign a ways back that I think said thirtysomething. I can call ahead to check on the paper’s closing time.”

      Lydia’s head was spinning. Go in that little red car right now when her parents would think she was working over here?

      “I came to work with Josh’s animals so—”

      “I can take care of them,” he said. “I know how much this means to you and how much you’ve meant to the animals and me.”

      Lydia’s gaze met and locked with his for a moment, but it seemed a long time. Sandra cleared her throat. “Let’s do it,” Lydia heard herself say. “I can’t thank both of you enough for your help.”

      “Besides, we need to get to know each other better, since we’re going to work together,” Sandra said, bobbing up from the sofa. “Who knows? Maybe their archives are online.”

      “Don’t bet on it,” Josh said.

      She got a flat, little thing out of her purse, flipped it open and started stroking the small screen. “I’ll just check the closing time of the Wooster Daily Record offices or else get their number and call them. And thirty-some miles means you can talk about your genealogy project en route and about an Amish Christmas coming back.”

      “You’ll be surprised how complicated my problem is compared to how simple our Christmas is—both of them,” Lydia told her as she and Josh stood, too. She wished she’d dressed better than her barn clothes but that wouldn’t stop her from going to Wooster. She was too eager to get started on finding out who she really was—and who this Sandra really was, especially what she meant to Josh.

      * * *

      By the time they pulled up in front of the Daily Record newspaper office in Wooster, the county seat for the next county, Lydia had talked a lot but learned a lot. One thing, though she hated to admit it, was that she liked Sandra Myerson. She seemed honest and straightforward, as Josh had said, a go-getter who knew what she wanted from life, and Lydia couldn’t help but admire that. Sadly, the woman did not like animals except cats, but surely there were worse flaws in human beings. At least, Lydia thought, that probably meant Sandra and Josh were not meant for each other, except for the fact Sandra had carried on about what a great, genuine guy he was.

      Dusk was descending as they hurried into the Daily Record office and told the curly haired woman at the reception counter what they hoped to find. She didn’t blink an eye that the two of them looked so different, but Wayne County had plenty of Amish, too.

      “Okay,” the receptionist said when she’d heard their inquiry, “a double death, car hits buggy. That or a court case means a clip should have been kept, though only events from the last ten years are stored in our computer system. From the time period you want, our clips are not in a database but should be in an envelope filed in the morgue.”

      “The morgue?” Lydia said.

      “Just our slang. We don’t have a librarian anymore, but some of our veteran editors know how to find stuff in the morgue—it’s kind of like a library. Let me see if someone can help you, but several have gone home already.”

      They waited about five minutes until a plump, sixty-something woman named Monica Jordan came out to help them. They wrote out their information for her and sat down to wait again.

      “I’ve done research in the States and Europe,” Sandra told her in a quiet voice. “It’s sometimes just like this—fill out forms and wait, but then—voilà!—some hidden gem falls right in your lap.

      “So what’s this about two Amish Christmases?” she asked. “Josh only told me about one, December 25, a family day, keep-it-simple, sometimes homemade gifts, a traditional meal. It sounds like the rest of us except for the lack of razzle-dazzle and ooh-la-la, no over-the-top decorations and Santa stuff we moderns enjoy.”

      “For sure no Santa stuff.”

      “But how about decorated trees? I passed a Christmas tree farm near Josh’s.”

      “That’s the Stark tree farm on the outskirts of Homestead, but the Amish don’t buy those. The moderns do, though, and the farm ships truckloads of trees to local cities to be sold on rented lots. That’s Ohio Senator Bess Stark’s family business, though she’s almost never here, and her son oversees it.”

      “Boy, that’s a good one. Snarky Stark’s family sells Christmas trees.”

      Lydia didn’t know what snarky meant but she didn’t want to ask. Sandra used all kinds of strange words like voilà.

      “So, go on about Christmas,” Sandra prompted.

      “The truth is that many Amish want to ignore the December 25 celebration, since the world has commercialized it so much. We struggle to ignore outside temptation and keep the day focused on our faith. But as for the second so-called Amish Christmas, we just call it Old Christmas because it went with the historical religious calendar from centuries ago. We close our stores on that day, too. It’s January 6, called Epiphany, the traditional day of the arrival of the wise men from the East—probably the first non-Jews to see the baby Jesus, and that shows anyone can approach Him.”

      “So you celebrate January 6, too, while the rest of America does not? I don’t think that’s very well-known. Great, I can use that in my dissertation on immigrant holidays. The modern-day Amish are against commercialized Christmas, so they cling to another day when the wise men brought their gifts to the manger.”

      “But it’s a simple day, too, sometimes spent with extended family. You know, that’s one of the things I might have missed, being adopted. I have a few cousins on my father’s side, but they don’t live within buggy distance, so I see them mostly

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