The vast majority of my childhood memories are from life on the family farm.  The farmhouse that my maternal grandparents lived in was the same home in which my maternal grandmother was born and raised.  My grandparents bought it from her family after her parents passed away. In addition to a family garden, Grandaddy raised pigs, chicken and cows when I was really young. Before I began school, I recall one piglet that I begged to care for when the momma sow pushed it aside. I remember bottle feeding it a time or two, but sadly don’t remember what ever happened to that poor piglet.  What I do remember very distinctly is the location the poor piglet was kept in when I fed it.  It was in a box that was housed in the middle section of the barn. It was so much more than a Barn! This barn was our adventure zone for many, many years.     

When I was 6 ½ , my mom, sisters and I moved into that farmhouse with her parents.  My main memory of the day we moved in was getting my bicycle off the truck quickly and being able to ride that little blue bike for hours on the farm.  Now, mind you, I probably thought I rode for miles and miles, but I was simply riding it around and around the house and barn area. After we moved in with my grandparents, the first farm animals to leave were the pigs.  You see, I wanted to be with the piglets as much as possible, and as a child I didn’t realize how dangerous a momma sow could become.  I was not aware for many years that Grandaddy sold them to protect us from harm.  The chickens stayed around for a few years longer, but Granny became aggravated with a particular rooster or two, so eventually they were gone as well.  But the cows remained for many years.  More on those in another post soon. 

Let’s journey back to The Barn though.  In this particular photo (which is printed in poster size and on the wall of my home today), the barn was nearing the end of its lifespan.  You can see the disrepair of the doors to the three separate areas.  What you can’t see in the photo is the backside of this barn. In the back, the roof extended quite some distance.  It included several different areas for various farm equipment and tools, as well as one stall area where mules and even a horse had once eaten their daily feed.  A very low sloping area held a workbench and a few farm tools.   The middle area was open all the way through and served as cover for a tractor and even Grandaddy’s car or truck at times. This covered area with its dirt floor was home to many “doodle bugs” as we called them. I can close my eyes now and remember singing some silly song while twirling sticks around their dirt mounds. We tried hard to get them to “come out” and play many summer days. Return with me now and look again at the front view of The Barn.  

The middle section is my favorite.  In that section we would find hay bales stacked in the rear half.  When they were first stacked up they nearly reached the top of the barn!  And of course it became a great place to swing from a rope down to the floor below.  Our cousins that lived one mile down the country road secured a sturdy rope to a rafter and introduced us to that swing.  I also remember sitting up on the top of the hay bales and pulling my first loose tooth!  This was after it had been loose for days and after my refusal to allow my cousin to try the string on a doorknob trick to yank it out. Grandaddy shooed us out of that section numerous times grumbling that the cows wouldn’t eat the day after we played on it so much.  I wonder how true that statement was?  

The nooks and crannies of the barn were favorite places for the many farm cats to raise litters of kittens. Plenty of snakes took up residence as well, but they were the good kind; king snakes and rat snakes.  The section on the left side held all kinds of odds and ends.  Broken tools and furniture were stashed in one corner.  The floor was rotting in most of it by the time I was grown.  During our childhood that section became the home of our very own “Banana Splits Club” for a time.  We even had the name painted on the door. I can’t recall the actual name of the Saturday morning kids show this originated from, but we held meetings for a brief time.  The section on the right was called the corn crib.  It too accumulated broken or unused furniture from various family members homes over time.  But it also held corn to dry for planting each year.  It even held a machine for shelling the kernels off the cob.  I liked turning the crank to see those kernels fall off; but of course, the novelty wore off quickly each time I was allowed to try.  

Now let’s look at the roof of that barn.  It was a perfect slide, once I gathered the courage to climb to the very top with my cousins.  The roof at the back of the feed stall was just low enough for us kids to climb up on to reach the higher slope.  Then we would journey to the top and slide down that seemingly steep slope.  Sometimes we simply jumped off on the gentle slope on the left side of the roof.  But usually, we walked back around the roof to climb to the top and slide down again. Just a few years ago, I was reminiscing with my mom about that giant slide and told her I often wondered how Granny got all the rust out of our pants.  She shared an interesting story about that slide.  If she was home when we were sliding, she frequently told us to come down.  One day she said she was unaware that Grandaddy was working in the tool area of the barn when she told us to “get down from there” and then walked back to the house.  She said she was almost to the back door when she heard Grandaddy come out from under the barn and tell us, “y’all can go back up there now.” She told me that at the time she was upset that he was okay with us being up there since it was not allowed during her own childhood.  Then, she realized that grandchildren get treated differently than their parents did as children.  Yep, they sure do!   

While it saddened me to learn the barn was no longer standing, the memories of that barn mean so much more to me than the actual building did.  In my memories it was strong, large, and a great place for adventures!  The farmland and surrounding area were also home to many adventures, some not quite as fun to recall as others!  More on those next week.  Those memories show me just how many times GOD was there protecting each of us on our numerous farm adventures.