“Birds nest wherever they fancy:
Mama Chickadee warms her
babes in a rusty hurricane lamp
high aloft above an old barn floor. ” – Joan Rooney
I love old barns, dark and musty and crammed with the detritus of life. Real farmers never buy anything new or anything at retail price. They figure they will never do everything more than once, and they cram the arts and old tractors and tools into the corner of the barn until it’s needed. They hate what is called “the price of things.”
Barns that are not loved tremble and die; the harsh winter storms take them apart. Actual barns can never be replaced by plastic or aluminum. When they are gone, they are gone forever.
Oh, the stories that could be told….
I also love old barns and houses. They have a soul and a story to tell. To see them alone and abandoned makes my heart sad.
The perspective on this photo is very interesting, Jon. And, falling barns just break my heart…a friend has one that’s going down slowly, but surely, but she doesn’t have the means to save it. Sad.
We have saved the barn on our farm. My grandfather and his brothers built it over 190 years ago. I’ve it.passio ately.
Thanks Rose, you’re a barn hero..
A few years ago the old Dutch barn in upstate NY that was so much a part of my childhood fell down. I’d been living in a different state and had come back home for good after my parents passed and the farm had been sold. I visited my old homestead and literally stood in an old buckwheat field and gazed upon the heaping pile of broken, twisted, splintered wood and cried for an hour. The wonderful smell of fresh hay and warm horses was gone forever. At the time I thought I saw the same barn owl sitting on the woodpile that had once always greeted me mornings with a whoo; joined by the coo from the pigeons, and the nicker from the horses looking for breakfast or a little love. It flew off without a look in my direction cementing the fact that everything is fleeting. The barn, the animals, the farm here that is no longer in use, and my lonely childhood. The once towering barn was my solace, my friend that hugged me everyday with arms of dust sparkled sunlight that streamed through the grey boards. The same grey boards that now lay in a heap before me, but had once warmed my very soul.