New Horizons

Today I bring you updates for both The Amish Descendant Scholarship Fund, (ADSF) and for what is happening in my personal life.

I will start with ADSF. July 10 was the deadline for students to submit their scholarship applications. We are considering a record number of students this year … 25 in all. It is gratifying to know that we are reaching the students who can use our scholarships to help them along their collegiate journey.

Now our challenge is to find enough funding to give large enough scholarships to make a difference in these students’ lives. They have already overcome so much to get to where they are. Going from an eighth-grade education to college has many challenges along the way. We don’t want the lack of funds to impede them now. Will you please go to our Donate page and give what you can to help these students succeed in earning a college education?

You donation will be matched until July 17! Our generous donor who has been matching funds is offering to extend the deadline, so your donation will mean even more to our students. If you have been meaning to donate to the Amish Descendant Scholarship Fund, now is the time your support is needed the most. Thank you in advance for your generosity!

As far as my life goes, David are moving… yet again, back to Ephrata, Pennsylvania where we were living before, but instead of buying a house we will rent indefinitely. We have found a small apartment on a side street, and we will live simply. So right now we are sorting through all our belongings and culling, and then culling some more. Aging is a process of letting go, and that is what we’re doing.

Saying good-bye to Vermont (for the third time) is bittersweet. We love the spring, summer, and fall here. If you look at the listing of our house, you will see we’ll be saying goodbye to our beautiful lake. But the winters are just too long, too harsh, and too dark for me. Seasonal affective disorder is a real thing, and when the light fades in winter, so do I. This past winter was a tough one in terms of the weather, even for the locals who have lived here their whole lives long. But I was grateful that David and I didn’t get physically sick, at least. The winter before, we were sick so much that it made the winter, it seems now that was the harder winter. We both kept getting sick, but mostly me. I was sick for 7 weeks out of the winter.

I kept saying to David, “I feel like there is mold in this house.” He kept saying that there wasn’t any sign of it in the basement, and I asked about the attic. The only access was hard to get to through a hole in the plywood, high above our kitchen door in the garage. Then when I got pneumonia last summer at the end of July, David finally opened up the hole into the attic and found it was black with mold up there.

In 1987 when this house was built it was common to vent the bathroom fans into the attic soffits. That is what was done here, and it was the source of our mold. David wore a Tyvek suit and a respirator to go up and vent the fans through the roof. Then we had to have the mold professionally removed. This was after we thought we had made all the renovations we were going to make in this house. I already didn’t want to be a homeowner anymore before that, and this experience was the last straw for me.

We were fortunate to have a contract signed within four days after we put it on the market. We close on July 30.

This was another adventure… the date on which we can move into our new home in Ephrata is August 20. We will be without a home for three weeks. So we are deciding to go on a vacation to places I’ve always wanted to visit. We’re heading up to Nova Scotia (particularly Cape Breton Island), and Prince Edward Island. So we are embracing this adventure before we settle down into simple living in Amish country.

Have you ever visited Nova Scotia or Prince Edward Island? I welcome any suggestions for places to visit if you have.