Anna Schwartz is visiting her aunt, uncle, and grandmother at their farm in the Oklahoma Amish community of Cody's Creek. Fall has arrived, and with it comes the annual harvest festival. But while others are enjoying all the activities, Anna is dealing with a matter of the heart...
Meet Anna and her grandmother (Mammi) in this touching excerpt from Anna's Healing, the first book in the Plain and Simple Miracles series by Vannetta Chapman.
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Anna turned and headed back toward the booth, hoping and praying he was no longer watching her every move.
Mammi was still sipping her lemonade and apparently enjoying the activity surrounding her. “You turned him down, didn’t you? I could tell the moment it happened. His shoulders fell as if he’d been crushed by a gigantic weight.”
“Danki. That makes me feel better.”
Mammi smiled and smacked her lips after another sip of the tart lemonade. “Why did you do it, then? Is there something wrong with him?”
“Nein. Maybe there’s something wrong with me, Mammi. Did you ever think of that?”
“You are as Gotte made you, Anna.”
“So why am I not interested in courting Neal Eberly? He’s a perfectly nice boy with a gut job. He doesn’t smell bad. His hair is cut nicely, and he has wunderbaar manners.”
“It takes more than the right manners and a nice haircut.”
“How did you know?”
Mammi waited.
“How did you know you were in lieb with Grossdaddi?”
The next words surprised Anna as much as anything that had happened that day.
“I don’t know that I was…at first. In my days girls didn’t marry for love so much as for someone to be a gut partner through life. But by the time I had my first boppli? Oh, yes. I loved your grossdaddi by then, and though he died eleven years ago, I still do.”
Anna thought about that as families continued to fill their yard and a line developed at her booth. Loving someone for your whole life. For years and years. For decades.
She supposed her parents loved each other like that, though it had always seemed to her that they were friends more than anything else.
And her aenti and onkel?
Maybe.
It was possible that love looked entirely different from what she had imagined.
* * *
Continue the story and learn more about the qualities of true love in Anna's Healing!
