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sensation of the wind on her face. This was certainly cooler than she would have been pushing her scooter along the road. She found herself relaxing and enjoying the ride.
    Micah, never at a loss for words, began to tell her about a pig that had escaped from Roland Yoder’s wagon. Roland, a butcher, was taking the animal to his brother’s place to be fattened for autumn, but as he was crossing the highway near Bird-In-Hand, a dog ran out at the buggy. The barking frightened the pig that then jumped over the rails and landed in the center of the road. Cars braked and horns honked. The pig ran back and forth causing a traffic jam.
    Ellen smiled and waited for the punch line. Like his father, Simeon, Micah’s stories were usually funny, sometimes hilarious. But Micah abruptly broke off in midsentence and reined in the horse.
    “Did you see that turtle?” he asked.
    She glanced over her shoulder. “Turtle?”
    “
Jah
, a box turtle. Just a little one, smaller than your fist.” He guided Samson onto the shoulder of the road. “Sit tight,” he said. “I’ll be right back.” Micah handed her the reins, climbed down off the seat and hurried back along the road. About thirty feet behind them, Ellen saw him cross to the center of the blacktop and pick up a round object. “Got him!” he proclaimed, holding the creature up for her to see. He carried the turtle to the far side of the road and put him down safely at the edge of the woods.
    “That was a small one,” she agreed as Micah got back into the buggy. “You don’t usually see them on the roads by the first of September.” This wasn’t the first time Micah had shown compassion for a small animal. She remembered him catching a six-inch black snake in the school cloakroom. Some of the other boys had wanted him to snap its neck against the shed wall, but he’d faced down two sixth graders and marched the snake to a hedgerow where he released it in the brush.
    “I always liked box turtles,” Micah said. “When we were young, Neziah and I always wanted to keep them as pets and train them to do tricks, but
Dat
wouldn’t let us. He always made us put them back exactly where we found them. He said they have their own territory, and if you move them out of it, they won’t rest until they get back to where they belong. A lot of them are run over by cars on the roads. I feel sorry for them, so I always take them across when I see one.” He arched an eyebrow. “You probably think it’s dumb.”
    “Nay.”
She shook her head. “I think it’s a decent thing to help any of God’s creatures.” She smiled in approval. “And I think you are a
goot
person, Micah Shetler, one any woman would be proud to have court her.”
    * * *
    The day at the shop was spotty, customer-wise. No one would come in for an hour, and then two or three cars would stop. Once, Ellen was ringing up an English woman, Dinah was showing quilts to another and two more people were waiting in line. At midday, she and Dinah took advantage of a lull in business to take their lunches out onto the porch where they could eat and watch the tourists and her Amish neighbors drive by.
    “I’m so excited about the new watercolors that arrived today,” Ellen told Dinah as she took another bite of her ham salad sandwich. There were four watercolors of Amish scenes painted by an ex-Amish woman in another area of the state. Each one showed a different season of the year. Her favorite, summer, was a scene of a mother hanging clothes on a line. Two daughters helped while a baby played on a blanket. All of the figures were shown from the back so that none of the faces could be seen, a concept that fit perfectly with the Plain way of living. The artist had signed her work simply as Rachel. Ellen thought the paintings were beautiful. The colors were soft blues and greens, and the frames were handcrafted of cherry. She expected them to sell quickly because Amish art was a favorite with her out-of-state