What's At Hand
There is an old country bromide that deals with this question thusly: What's the best kind of wood to burn? Answer: whatever you have plenty of. Maybe in the same way, the best place to write about is where you sit and the best images to gather to show the forms that light takes are the ones it falls on within your vision.
I have an inordinate number of pictures of our barn. When I look up from my work I see it from my window every day-- weathered and gray, some rot in the timbers, but full of character. I love the way its hard edges cut the light reflected from the morning snow. I am entranced by the way moonlight bathes the roof in blue light when cloud shadows surge across the valley and up over the ridge. And I appreciate the old barn for the very fact of its existence. Like the house, the realtors figured whoever would buy this land would come in right away and tear down the old structures and put up new. They placed no value on house or barn while we saw the riches both would offer. And we were right.
I had first seen the barn as utilitarian storage. But it has come to represent so much more. It is the same barn every day and yet each hour's new light makes it different, shows another of its faces to me. It is a testimony of craftsmanship, to still stand after more than a hundred years of ice and heat, wind and storm. It is a emblem of aging gracefully.
I had said for years before we finally found our place here that I wanted to put down roots somewhere and know the same trees and hilltops through the seasons year after year. I suppose I can include the old barn as a fixture in my sense of belonging. It is not permanent any more than I am immortal. But it is a relative constant in this quiet life, an icon of green pastures by still waters. And so you will see more of it from time to time because it is the barn I have plenty of.
Comments
Beautiful! I'll look at barn pictures till the cows come home.
Posted by: Amy | January 27, 2004 2:17 PM
On the farmstead where I grew up, the barn has been torn down, the hog houses and corn cribs have been torn down, the big old evergreen has been torn down. The house has been torn down and the basement filled in with dirt. It must have been good dirt, for the grass that grew there was a bright green rectangle compared to the dull grass around it - it was the ghost of the house. Now they've plowed it up and grow corn there, where a family lived and loved. There are ghosts on the landscape, we can't see them but they are there, waiting to tell their stories. Every old barn I drive past calls out for me to stop, come feel the wood of it, feel the stories resonate through it. In my memoir of growing up on the farm, CURLEW: HOME, I talk about the loss we've endured out here in the middle west with so many farmsteads gone, so many fences torn out. My aunt Pat, who lives in Curlew, says that farmers planting all the way out into the ditch "looks like greed." Every time a barn is torn down, we forget a little more of where we come from. If you forget where you come from, you don't know who you are. - Tom
Posted by: Tom Montag | January 27, 2004 4:10 PM
Ah...appreciating that which has captured your eye and your heart...for as long as it remains. I like that!
Posted by: Da Goddess | January 27, 2004 7:56 PM
Old barns are highly prized out here. Any that can be saved and adapted into other uses sell briskly. Those that can't be rehabbed are carefully dissembled and the wood, doors, windows and hardware are recycled into new homes and buildings....very few fall down anymore...recycling/antique dealers comb the countryside looking for them.
Omega Salvage in Berkeley specilizes in architectual elements and their trendier spawn Omega Too snap up everything they can find from demolition and remodeling firms and resell it. Omega Too has the most wonderful selection of brass, Victorian and Craftsman geegaws. We love to wander their yards where you can browse bathroom fixtures that span 80 years, or rows of doors, no two alike.
Our modern building codes and methods have standardized everything, but as the doors and barns demonstrate, once such details were up to the whimsy or needs of the builder.
You're lucky to have such a treasure.
Posted by: feste | January 27, 2004 8:51 PM
Tom, you stole my words! When you say "come feel the wood of it", it is as if you knew what I was about to say. I see that barn, and my first instinct is to want to touch it. To feel the voices in the timbers, and to touch the past. To run my hands across the rough places, especially the rough places, and breathe in the stories worn into those planks.
Old barns are like temples of our past. I love them dearly.
Posted by: ntexas99 | January 27, 2004 10:49 PM
To ntexas99: Some seventeen years ago, I toured a museum in Dauphin, Manitoba that included an old house with three rooms on the first floor, a dormitory style sleeping area on the second floor. Going up the stairs to the second floor, when I touched the railing, I was nearly knocked to my knees as if by an electric charge - the railing had been worn smooth and shiny by the touch of many hands, and it was as if I was touching everyone of them who had touched it. The past is not done, I think; it keeps reverberating into the present - through the railing of a stairs, in old barn boards, along old paths pounded hard as brick where nothing grows any more, in old photographs, and other such places. - Tom
Posted by: Tom Montag | January 28, 2004 7:11 AM
Tom Montag -- your post made me want to be there to caress the smoothness of the rough stories told within the worn wood railings.
I've never been able to explain why wood speaks to me so richly ... I only know that it does, and that I'm enriched by having touched the many surfaces. thanks for sharing your comment, and may there be many more electric jolts.
Posted by: ntexas99 | January 30, 2004 10:17 PM