Abandoned Barns

"Inside a barn is a whole universe, with its own time zone and climate and ecosystem, a shadowy world of swirling dust illuminated in tiger stripes by light shining through the cracks between the boards. Old leather tack, lengths of chain, rope, and baling twine dangled from nails and rafters and draped over stall railings. Generations of pocketknives lay lost in the layers of detritus on the floor."

~ Carolyn Jourdan

I love old falling-down barns! This one is not on our land but on a little used road up the mountain. It stands - well slumps - in a field that seems to hold little else but the barn and wildflowers and a stone-bubbled track that appears to have been recently used by a truck. I can imagine abandoned barns when they were painted red and housed sweet-smelling hay and the piquant sweat of horses. When the sun-sparked dust motes floated above cows laying in straw and manure chewing their cuds methodically. As a child on the friend's grandparents' farm we would play on the second floor of the barn and amongst its hundreds of stacked hay bales. There was nothing up there but hay, sunshine, dust, hidden litters of kittens, pigeons, and the secret games of children rosy with sun-roasted cheeks and the blooming lust of our first puerile kisses.

We would slide hollering down the hay chute into the feed troughs of feeding cows and laugh at their astonished and confounded faces as we appeared beneath their noses.

I think you will find a lot of photos of old barns on this site over time. I cannot seem to pass them by. Some people love old churches. I love old barns more than churches. Even in their dying, they sing the sunshine that pours through their rotting rafters. I can love that song.

An old collapsing barn in a field on a road up the mountain.