Squeezed together on the hard wooden benches in the meeting room of the country schoolhouse, we sang Christmas carols, a slow, modal sound echoing off the plain pine walls. It came upon the midnight clear. Outside, the storm cocooned us in snow, the flakes swirling through the darkness, covering the horses at the hitching post. It was the night of the Christmas program in my neighborhood, a rural Iowa community where I am one of the few “English,” or non-Amish. Several families were delayed, their sleighs inching over waist-high drifts. Mahlon, the minister, kept us singing, his hand moving up and down with a steady rhythm. That glorious song of old.

Then some older boys extinguished the kerosene lanterns hanging from the ceiling hooks. Our voices hushed. A chorus of young voices arose from the basement steps, the notes pure and clear. Thirteen Amish children and their teacher—who couldn’t have been more than eighteen years old—wound through the meeting room. Each child carried a single white candle, the light glowing in the darkness. With angels bending near the earth.

The candles were snuffed, the lanterns re-lit, and the children went into a sing-song rhyming recitation of a poem dedicated to “Grandma.” Just one grandma? I thought. There have to be others here. The room was packed with older women, their shawls draped over their shoulders, their white hair pulled back into buns. But when the poem was finished, just one grandma stood up and bowed. She was the ancestor of all the children, these siblings and cousins smiling out at us with the same grin that swept across the old woman’s face.