Of Barns and Seasons

The angles, timbers, shape and underpinnings of the old bank barn always delight, and they give me food for thought, a heaping teaspoon of much needed humility, a sense of my own smallness in the greater scheme of things.

This is the view from the west, a wall of oak planks with its topmost winch for pulling hay into the loft and later lowering it into the stalls below, the old tin roof and its lightening rods, the branches of a guardian winter tree, a few clouds, the gray sky behind giving some thought to turning blue on a chill morning in March.

I marvel at the gargantuan hemlock and cedar posts hewed out by hand more than a century ago, shaped and fitted into place by an unknown pioneer handcrafting a place of shelter — the old oak planks forming the walls — the curving roof and rough stone foundation of the structure. I think of generations of farmers and horses wending their way home after a hard day spent tilling the rocky scraps of steep field above the barn and enfolding it — I think of the many thousands of sunrises, moonrises and starry nights which this place has witnessed, of the countless seasons it has seen come and go — I think of the red fox and her children who live in a den on the hill behind the granary.

I call my old barn "the Lady", and she always seems to be standing in a strong clear light, a wise teacher who has important lessons to impart to a somewhat gormless twentieth century crone. She (Barn) leans gently and effortlessly into the hills of her native place, and her stalwart muscular contours mirror the rugged landscape of the holding on which she was raised so many years ago.

Silvered by time and sculpted by the winds, Barn endures on her rolling timeless slope in a fold of the Lanark highlands, and so shall I in one form or another: a leaf, a pebble, a tree, a clear meandering stream. This is another one of those lessons I strive to remember and am always forgetting.