Old Barns Becoming Memories

The old red barn across the street from us is a pile of rubble now . At first it was just listing to the side. One day the roof gave way. Now it is caving in upon itself. Soon it will be just a sodden mass of weathered boards where once a functional structure stood proudly.

It’s a real shame. I fear the old wooden barns, beautiful buildings in their own right, are going the way of the barn owl. They are getting scarcer and scarcer as the years roll on.

These barns are treasures. The Michigan Barn Preservation Network calls them “economic resources and symbols of our agricultural heritage”. I believe there is no more attractive image than a well-kept, freshly painted barn, surrounded by white fences, stolidly occupying the space between planted fields and wooded hedgerows and housing the various farm implements necessary to work the land.

I also find it ludicrous that we cannot insure our own barn for enough money to rebuild even a tiny corner of it. Of course, in reality, a pole barn is more efficient. It can store more stuff. It is easier to maintain. But it lacks the charm of the hand-hewn beams, the solid oak floor, and the multi-roomed layout of a barn built near the turn of last century.

I love to stand inside our barn on a rainy day and hear the sound of raindrops on the steel roof. My husband has room for all his projects in its spacious basement layout. Up above, we can store garden supplies and weights and rabbit cages, old doors and outgrown bicycles, and still have room to pull the tractor in. In the summer, the swallows return and build their mud nests under the high eaves.

I have so many vivid memories of that barn, including:
-Climbing up the wood ladder some forty feet to see fireworks out the top window
-Sitting with the kids watching Rocket, the calf, be born
-Watching tiny reddish piglets snuggle under the heat lamp
-Playing Ping Pong in the hay mow
-Staying away from the mean rooster who was prone to attack you as your head emerged when you climbed the basement stairs
-Filling up the loft with square hay bales while visiting cousins helped
-Holding my breath as Rick dangled aloft and ripped off two layers of shingles
-Using the South wall as a huge screen for Kara’s wedding powerpoint

Though our own barn is no longer filled with the soft breath of animals, it remains as a tribute to another way of life-a time when a small farmer, owner of a couple of hundred acres, willing to work hard, could earn a decent living from the land for the family.