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.
Mike Lunsford
The Off Season: The life of and the life in a barn…
- Mike Lunsford
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Books open our eyes to that which we will never see
I got a letter last week from a friend, Sister Margaret Quinlan, who lives amidst the beauty of the St. Mary-of-the-Woods campus. Besides the email space and the time she invests in describing the flowers and trees and birds that she shares with her roomies out there, as well as her accounts of teaching and traveling, Margaret most often writes about books. She loves them, and she knows I do, too.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Hoping to master the art of taking a nap
I got away from work as early as I could one day last week. It was a cloudy day, filled with grayness and rain, and my head felt as if I had inhaled my pillow the night before. My throat suggested I’d swallowed a wood rasp, too, and my eyes felt as though I was looking through someone else’s glasses. Yet, I had work do, this column being on the list of chores.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Windy companion finally gives him the cold shoulder
The wind came to visit us this week. We live on the knob of a hill that overlooks a Raccoon Creek valley, and it is a breezy spot year-round, but this wind was the kind that ushers in a full-blown front from Canada, perhaps just to remind us that cold weather is going to be the boss around here for a while. No matter how surprising our mild winter has been so far, this kind of wind tells us not to expect many more warm days over the next few months.
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SIDELINES: Good for even a traditional Classic buff
Lights down, tree out, another year gone at the Classic.
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THE OFF SEASON: The more things change, the more they keep changing
I must have had at least a dozen people ask at my son’s wedding a few weeks ago whether I cried, or “how I was handling losing him.” I think they all knew just how tight I am with my two kids, and thought I must have come completely unglued when it finally hit me that he was on his own for good, that the rules had changed nearly as much in my life when he said ,“I do,” as they did for him.
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Lunsford signing new book at Brazil Coffee Grounds
Parke County writer Mike Lunsford will be signing his latest book, “A Place Near Home” (Shade Tree Press; $15) from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday at Coffee Grounds, Bakery and Coffee Shop in Brazil.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: In the neighborhood with the ‘fantastic’ Mr. Fox
As we drove home late one night last week, my wife and I, both a bit drowsy and anxious for a warm bed and a long nap, were surprised to see a red fox as it darted across the road. He made his appearance in a flash — just a bit of nose and fur and bushy tail — as he jumped out of a ditch in front of our car and was caught in the glare of our headlights on his way to the relative safety of an apple orchard.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The lizard wore long johns, and other Halloween tales
We stocked our house with a supply of Halloween candy last week; Joanie and I stopped into the new dollar store in town and filled a grocery cart with Butterfingers and Baby Ruths and Three Musketeers bars. Every aromatic bit of it has been calling to me from the orange-and-black baskets we keep on a living room trunk ever since.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Here’s to the simple beauty of an untended garden…
I can hear a combine eating its way across a nearby cornfield as I write this on a Saturday evening. It is a sound that signals the end of one season and the beginning of anot
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The Off Season: Listening to Mozart is a ‘purr-fect’ way to relax
Regardless of what some people may believe, classical music fans are not snobs. They come from all walks of life, fall into all income brackets, and they’re not required to understand or analyze anything to which they’re listening; they just need to enjoy themselves.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Fall’s arrival heralded in ever-present fencerows
As much as I hate summer to leave us, I am happy that fall is just around the corner. It has been a bone-dry season, one in which I’ve watched my yard bake and crack like an old pie crust. My wife and I are still spending our evenings going about the business of watering flowers, standing with a dribbling hose in our hands, optimistically hoping that our drought will be broken because we’ve tempted the weather fates to do us one better and give us a good rain.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The value of hard work goes well beyond a paycheck
Years ago, I used to drive into Rosedale to get my workday started with a big cup of black coffee. Every morning, Monday through Friday, until the town grocery store’s business dried up and blew away, you could have found me slipping through a back door — left unlocked for the early birds — of the old Red and White, 15 minutes before it opened for official business.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Life’s little conveniences actually can be quite annoying
I am aware that much of the language I use is outdated, stodgy, old-fashioned; I apologize.
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The Off Season: Another sad passing: One-time trendsetter can’t keep up
I wandered into the local mall bookstore the other day. My wife and I had come to town with a list of chores to do and things to buy, but whenever we venture anywhere near a place with book shelves and sales tables and racks of paperbacks, we’re attracted to the scent of ink and the sight of book covers like bees to clover .
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Overheated in Hobart and other vacation tales…
My family climbed into our van and headed to Michigan a few weeks ago, just as we do every other year or so, to stay on the great lake there, for we have come to love its cool breezes and blue water and lighthouses.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Silence is wonderful, as long as you don’t take it too far
I have visited this topic — how it is often only through inconvenience that we come to appreciate the comforts we have in life — before.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: His tolerance for insects ends with sawyer beetles
As I sloshed a can of water over a pot of red petunias a Sunday morning ago, I saw a pine sawyer beetle make its way slowly up the vinyl siding near my front door. I swatted it to the concrete, and smashed it with my shoe … with impunity, I might add.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Storm damage makes you appreciate home
My wife and I hadn’t been into town for a good while when we drove in from our place to visit her doctor and my favorite hardware store last week.
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Paying respect in more way than one way…
It has become a habit of mine on Mother’s Day to go to Rosedale Cemetery and lay a few irises on my mom’s grave.
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The Off Season: On the trail with Max the Mushroom Cat
The wet weather and a busy calendar have kept my wife and me from doing what we’ve really wanted to do for a while. Ever since the thermometer began to stay consistently above 40 and the grass started to green, we’ve wanted to get outside, get some sun on our arms, and get down to the wetlands to watch the geese make their landings with a flourish and a honk.
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THE OFF SEASON: So much to do; so little time…
My wife’s aunt, Martha Jean McCarthy, passed away earlier this month; she was 85 years old. Martha Jean was kind and generous and busy her entire life.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: A lesson plan for public schools
I am an advocate of public education; I pull no punches about that. I have taught in public schools for 32 years, and I think it is an inherently American institution.
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THE OFF SEASON: Craning to see elegance in flight
Just before midnight last night, spring officially slipped quietly into our back yards, but I doubt that any of us noticed it much this morning as we slurped our coffee or downed our eggs over this newspaper.
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The office boy who became a poet
I made up my mind when I moved my home office out of the house last summer that I’d organize some of my books, that I’d categorize and catalogue them in a way that would help me find the one I wanted when I wanted it. I can’t say it worked out as well as I had hoped. Already, I have the overflow stacked on the floor and shoved into the spaces where previous tenants once lived. Gradually, expediency is replacing order, so fiction and non-fiction, biographies and novels, are scandalously co-mingling on my shelves.
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THE OFF SEASON: The office boy who became a poet
I made up my mind when I moved my home office out of the house last summer that I’d organize some of my books, that I’d categorize and catalogue them in a way that would help me find the one I wanted when I wanted it. I can’t say it worked out as well as I had hoped.
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THE OFF SEASON: It’s taken long time to say thanks…
It was with a cup of coffee and a newspaper in my hands a few Mondays ago that I discovered that Mr. Hapenny had died.
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THE OFF SEASON: Lessons learned from the night the ice fell
The picture window of my cabin is sealed in a perfect glaze of ice as I write this, last Thursday morning, and since it faces due north and sees little direct sunlight, I imagine I will be looking through this shower door glass of mine for a few more days. But since I sit and watch the woods much of the time, instead of writing, I suppose the ice is serving a rare good purpose in keeping me on task.
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The Off Season: Pass a ‘midnight dreary’ with The Big Read
It was a pretty poor excuse for an evening one night last week as I lay beside our glowing fireplace, a pillow propped behind my head. I was spending some time with my current read, enjoying each page in the semi-darkness, smug in the knowledge that I’d not be heading to my classroom the next day.
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The Off Season: ‘Too old and too lazy’ to deal with coyotes
Despite the cold and the ever-present winter breezes that blow across our hill these days, I often find myself, even in the blue evenings, standing on the walk near my cabin, looking at the stars or watching for the last red-tailed hawks of the day as they float by in the drafts.
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The Off Season: The passion of having a passion is a great thing
It just occurred to me that I am fortunate to have a passion — a drive to do something that takes me away from the clutches of my job, of home repairs, of the mundane and the ho-hum.
- More Mike Lunsford Headlines
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