I keep my gaze cast down, but I feel the men’s eyes on me as I go through the door. We enter a common area where I imagine the farm implements, wagons, and buggies are usually stored. All that has been cleared to make room for the congregation. The interior is dimly lit by several lanterns. It’s warmer, but not by much. The smell of wood smoke fills the air, and I spot an old-fashioned potbellied stove in the corner. A boy of about ten years of age has been charged with keeping it stoked.

A scarred wooden table has been set up at one end of the main room. Dozens of backless benches have been arranged in rows separated by an aisle. At the rear, a dozen or so chairs have been neatly arranged. Several are occupied by elderly women.

“We’ll put the pudding in the tack room.” Mary motions to a door with a step up to a wood plank floor.

Nodding, I take the two bags into a room that smells of molasses and leather. A lantern flickers from atop an oak barrel. Two women stand next to a rectangular table already teeming with food: pies, rustic breads, and a ham dotted with cloves that looks home-cured. Steam rises from the spout of an old-fashioned enamel coffeepot.

“Hello,” I say.

A stout older woman wearing a black bonnet and heavy black cape smiles at me. “You must be the widow from Ohio.”

I introduce myself.

“Welcome to New York,” the younger of the two says. “You settling in okay?”

I tell them I’m renting Bowman’s trailer and the two women exchange looks. “It’ll be a nice cold winter for you.”

They get a good chuckle out of that.

The older woman jabs a thumb at the bags I brought. “What do you have there?”

“Date pudding,” I tell them. “Where shall I put it?”

“Just set it up there with the rest.” The older woman looks past me. “I believe Bishop Schrock is about to begin, so we’d best get in there.”

By the time we enter the main part of the barn, the last of the unmarried men and teenage boys are coming through the door single file and making use of the benches in the back. As is usually the case, the women are seated on one side of the aisle, the men on the other.

The smell of kerosene from a large space heater mingles with the aromas of woodsmoke, the food in the back room and the lingering scents of hay and sweet feed and horses. I haven’t attended a preaching service in years, but already I feel the anticipation of that first hymn building inside me.

It’s a reverent moment and, though I don’t know any of the people around me, a shared kinship. In unison, the men remove their hats, placing them beneath the bench upon which they’re sitting. I don’t feel like a cop as I take my place on the bench with the rest of the single women and visitors at the rear of the room. I’m young and Amish and the words to the first hymn venture from the recesses of my memory.