Mary's Christmas Goodbye: An Amish Romance

Mary Stoltzfus is thirty years old and in her Amish world, that qualifies her to be called an old maid. She is living a quiet schoolteacher life in the Lancaster County Amish community when she gets a surprising invitation in the mail requesting she come to Montana to teach. She is fully at home in eastern Pennsylvania, where she can go out to eat in dozens of restaurants, do her laundry in a newfangled washer that’s powered by compressed air, and hire a driver if she wants to go farther than her horse and buggy can comfortably take her. Mary becomes annoyed by the cracks in the floor of her one-room schoolhouse, the noise of the nearby road, and the two eighth-grade boys who try to make toilet paper cigarettes and nearly burn down the privy. Mary takes an Amtrak and arrives at a desolate station and meets Arthur Bontrager, who had signed the invitation and has come to introduce her to Beaver Creek School, dirt roads, and the fancy shed where she would live, settling into this new world of mountain ranges and pine-tree majesty.