Crossing Over by Irene Garrett with Rick Farrant

     Ruth Irene Garrett was the fifth of seven children raised in Kalona, Iowa, as a member of a strict Old Order Amish community.  She was brought up with rigid rules and intense secrecy in a world where the dress, buggies, codes of conduct, and the way of life differed from that of other Amish societies a mere one hundred miles away. Ruth's story is rooted in the ways of one particular Amish community and does not necessarily reflect the ways of all Amish.
     Ottie Garrett rolled into Kalona in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell.  He was among hundreds of English people across the country hired by the Amish as drivers for up to sixty-five cents a mile, and he was in town bringing relatives from Indiana and Illinois for Thanksgiving. Ruth was a naive fifteen-year-old who had recently graduated from the one-room Centerville School, which was a half-mile up the road from her father's farm. Ottie was a forty-year-old man of the world, married three times, about to get a another divorce, and more boisterous than anybody Ruth had ever encountered before or since. Ottie and Ruth form a bond and later they run away from the Amish community and marry.
     Ruth is ban from the Amish community and tries to rekindle relations with her Amish family.  She receives letters from her family trying to get her to change her mind and come home.  Ruth is content with the new life that she has found with Ottie and his family in Kentucky.  Crossing Over is a true story of one woman's extraordinary flight from the protected world of the Amish people to the chaos of contemporary life.
     This is a beautiful story of a young lady's struggle to be free.