Published: July 27, 2009 12:02 am         

The Off Season: The life of and the life in a barn…

One of the things my wife and I most wanted when we moved to our place almost 30 years ago was the barn that sat behind the house. It wasn’t an old, old relic of the neighborly barn-raising and horse-and-buggy days, but it did have room for the roan mare my wife rode at the time and plenty of space for the tools I’d inherited from my grandfather. It also needed a lot of work.

We’ve always thought it a shame to see so many barns in our countryside with sagging roofs and rotting sides as they showed years of neglect and weather, so we vowed when we first came to this homestead that we’d always keep our barn dry and tight and upright.

I think we’ve kept that promise; it was promptly painted and properly roofed.

Rather than slap yet another coat of paint on the spots that needed it the most, I told my wife last fall that we would have to spend a little money in the spring and replace much of the wood siding on the barn’s north side. After nearly 50 years of facing Indiana’s snows, rains, winds and withering heat, many of the planks there had warped and rotted and no longer had the teeth to hold their nails.

So last week, with relatively few jobs lined up to tackle, I drove into town and bought enough new lumber and No. 6 nails to get the job done. I also called my buddy, Joe, to come and bring his saws, his knowledge, and his two young field hands, Josh and Torre, who also happen to be apprentice carpenters and budding mechanics, painters and stainers, trash haulers and roofers — whatever Joe decides they need to do at the time.

Our barn was not sided with yellow poplar — the wood of choice for farm buildings in these parts — so I decided to simply replace my planking pine for pine; in another four or five decades, despite its linseed oil and red paint, it will probably need transplants again. Much of the barn’s rafters and roofing is rough-cut oak and hickory, and the whole thing sits on solid posts of sycamore, the latter probably cut off the hillside just beside it, but the old boards covering those posts have seen better days.

Before the boys began to tear off the see-through planks, I burrowed open a four-foot wide spot in a stone flower bed I had built alongside the barn 20 years ago. I wanted to crawl through the gap and get under a little tack room that I’ve converted into a tool shop. The shop’s clutter is an incongruous chaos for someone who is known to be a notoriously neat obsessive-compulsive who struggles with messes, but its floor had sagged from years of holding tamping rods and come-alongs and bolt cutters and the like, and I saw a chance to remedy its lean to the east. The dirt under that floor hadn’t seen the light of day for years, so I laid concrete block and brick supports on fine, dry dust that day, a cool breeze blowing under the floor and into my face.

Over the years, our barn has been home to dozens of 4-H rabbits, to horses, to wayward dogs and soon-to-be-mother cats. Bats have hung limply in its rafters; raccoons have raided our recycling cans there, ripping and tearing into rinsed plastic milk jugs and shampoo bottles as if competing for the last bargain on dollar-day. Possums have grinned at us from the hayloft ever since we moved in. Black snakes have slithered in its timbers while mice have run its nooks and crannies to avoid both the snakes and the cats, and birds have built their nests in every corner and rafter and beam. The barn swallows we had there just a few years ago insisted on building their mud pillboxes beneath the floor joists of the loft, swooping and diving and squawking if we came near. They apparently found it too busy a place to raise a brood, and simply moved on.

Just this summer, a fat groundhog came calling; I often watched him head for the northeast corner of my barn in the mornings when things were still a bit asleep, and I took in the sunlight as it first filtered through the trees. I found the spot where he had begun construction on a tunnel under a wall. I presumed that our compost pile table scraps were no longer enough to satisfy him, and he’d decided to dip into our cat bowls, as well. I think the big chunks of sandstone I placed along the foundation eventually discouraged him because his tunnel building has stopped.

It’s not just my wife and I who have grown older with the barn; my two kids have grown up with it, too. They have spent countless hours in the place, tending to their rabbits, playing with the box turtles we kept for the summer in an old tractor tire a few steps out the back door. I’m sure that the barn became a place that they hated to clean — raking up under the rabbit cages is hardly a party — but still loved because of its quiet and its smell of grass hay. It was there that our cats delivered kittens, our old dog surprised us with puppies, and that we often stood under the eaves to hear the rain beating time on the tin. I still kick up a matchbox car or army soldier in the dirt where my son spent many of his summer days playing.

As we worked in the afternoon sun for a pair of days, Joe and the boys and I swatted the wasps that our hammering had shaken out of the semi-darkness of the loft. We found places where the wood-boring bees had drilled themselves silly; a blue-green skink that lives amidst my wood pile showed himself to us a few times, too. We sawed and nailed and drank tea, and the boys occasionally punched one another; we had our mess cleaned up before suppertime.

I hope to have the time this week to get my old extension ladder off the barn wall and get after the task of painting my newly repaired north wall. I’ll brush and roll the paint onto the boards — not spray it on — and, once again, I’ll acquaint myself with just about every inch of that old barn from top to bottom. While I’m at it, I think I’ll take a good, long look at the roof.

After all, a promise is a promise.

Mike Lunsford can be reached at hickory913@aol.com, or through regular mail c/o the Tribune-Star, P.O. Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808. Learn more about Mike’s writing at www.mikelunsford.com. His second book, “Sidelines: The Best of the Basketball Stories…,” will be released this fall.