Hello Readers! I'm so glad you're here. My name is Saloma Furlong. I often feel as though I have lived two lives in one — the first inside an Amish community and the other in the mainstream American culture. Now I write what I have learned along the way.

I was born and raised in an Amish community in northeastern Ohio and longed for the freedom I could only glimpse in the “outside world.” I was devastated when my formal education ended abruptly at the age of thirteen, yet the Amish rules were too deeply rooted to be broken.

Bound by my desire for freedom and more formal education, I left the only life I knew at age twenty to go to Vermont where I knew no one. I reveled in my newfound freedom, established a social life, and began dating a young toymaker named David. When a vanload of Amish arrived at my front door, my sense of having a choice over the direction of my life vanished instantly because they brought with them the forces that bound me to kin and culture. I returned, where I felt conflicted between loyalty to my parents and community, and my longing for the freedom I'd tasted in Vermont.