I keep thinking of my drive last Friday along the back roads of Lancaster County. Young men in suspenders drove horse-drawn plows; cresting one hill I saw a team of seven. Women in long dresses hoed in their gardens (two young ones with bare feet). By a stream, a thick-bearded man walked hand-in-hand with his daughter on one side and his son on the other. A tent appeared, and I asked the young man mending the fence if they were getting ready for a picnic. “Fishing derby,” he told me, and I wished him good luck. Then I passed a boy driving a cart pulled by a pony. Everything was suffused in the golden light of early evening, and I thought how far away the rest of the world seemed: the war in Ukraine, the stock market crisis. It didn’t occur to me then to include mass shootings.
