Old Barns and Old Farms

There is something about those old dilapidated weathered buildings you see on old farmsteads that calls to me. Those graying boards, missing windows, and empty rooms all hint at a simpler life in simpler times. My great-grandmother lived for many, many years on a small farmstead in rural MI, only leaving when her health declined. My grandmother and her two siblings were raised there and my dad, his siblings, and cousins all helped out with chores and fieldwork during their childhood summers. It was a small farm with a few cows, a bull, a very mean rooster (or was it a goose?), some chickens, a few horses (I think) and a tame skunk that came to the door to be fed and once to show off it’s family. The farmhouse was an old log cabin (that porcupines adored eating) with three rooms downstairs and a small upstairs for bedrooms and a homemade weaving loom. The kitchen housed the wood cook stove that took up an entire wall and, if I remember right, provided heat for the small home. I don’t remember much about that house except that the wooden shingle siding had already acquired the grayed, antiqued look long before I was born. I remember the cook stove being a big black, cast iron thing with the perpetually percolating coffee pot keeping warm in a back corner. (My dad claims the grounds were rarely emptied so you ran the risk of getting coffee that ranged from a decent cup’o’joe to high-octane tar.) I remember the bare lonely bulb hanging in the changing room of her sauna and eating raspberries off the bushes as I walked back to the house after washing up. I remember the cracked vinyl on the 70's era floral-print toilet seat cover displayed in proud prominence in the outhouse (even in her later years, my great-grandmother refused to get indoor plumbing). Mostly, though, I remember her barn. It was massive to my little kid mind, rising tall in the twilight hours when the bats would fly out of the rafters to catch the mosquitoes buzzing about. Though long empty of farmyard animals, it was still home to the bats, some birds, and I am sure the occasional wild barn cat. It, like the house, had long ago turned to the faded gray of aged wood and was starting to sag around the edges though it was still used for storage. I always wondered what it was like inside when the animals were still there. I imagined the smell of bedding, cows, and horses. I pretended that light filtering in through the cracked window panes transformed the dusty bare floor into a blanket of golden straw. I could hear the sound of cows chewing their cud, the ‘whoof’ and stomp of the bull as he shifted in his stall, the meow of a hungry barn cat. To open my eyes would be to admit it was just an empty old barn. In my mind, I was transported back 30 years, to a time before I was born, when it was home to those animals. I fell in love with old barns and buildings as a young girl visiting my aging great-grandmother but to this day, I can’t drive past an old farmstead without wondering what stories those old homes and barns could tell. Perhaps that's partly why I ended up out here milking cows for a living...