Gail Strock writes and edits from her farm in Belleville, Pa.
My hand brushes the tail of our friendliest cat, Freddie Underfoot. True to his name, he performs figure-eights around my feet as I walk out to our barn. My attempt to pet him while in motion became a swipe and a miss, so I stop to pet him properly. Better for both of us.
I’ve been going “out to the barn” most of my life for various reasons. First, as a child on a farm where nearly every plant and animal served a food or fiber purpose — cows for milk and meat, chickens for eggs, gardens for vegetables, fruit trees for refreshment, and fields of corn, wheat, oats, and alfalfa for animal feed. No grocery store needed.
I later learned about production dairy farming after marrying my husband. His family mass-produced milk in Pennsylvania; then we bought our own farm two hours to the west. After 35 years, and except for a few chickens and cats, this farm is now retired, just like us.
So today, with no real work to do, I’m just on a walkabout. I tell myself I’m looking for anything amiss — boards blown off by a storm or damaged downspouts where rain might rot the wood. But I know how this walkabout will end.
I watch Freddie move toward our barn, a massive structure built in 1877. Those who have had the honor, pleasure, and distinction of being raised on a farm know that a farm’s focal point is the barn. The fields, pastures, and woods give us room to roam and essential life-sustaining products, but the barn stands as the stalwart center for shelter and storage for all we have worked for.
This barn was erected by neighbors helping neighbors at a barn raising. Men hand-hewed tall oak timbers into full-length, two-foot-square posts that were notched and pegged together. They squared the rectangular frame and reinforced it with more hand-hewn hickory or chestnut beams, and then sided it with hemlock or white pine boards. Stone walls two feet thick were laid by hand to support the entire structure. Barns built like this have outlived generations of owners.
The barns of our region are of a type. Usually two to three stories high, they’re built abutting a hillock along one long side. This creates a grassy “barn hill” that leads up to huge barn doors on the upper level that you slide wide open for loading or unloading hay or storing machinery. On the opposite long side, that upper level extends beyond the lower level to form an “overshot” supported by beams. This creates shelter in bad weather for farmers feeding calves and milking cows.
I follow Freddie into the barn’s lower level, glancing at the empty horse and cow stables and calf pens.
My husband and I produced and sold field crops, but our barn’s most valuable product has been our sons. They’d press their toddler bellies against the dinner table, wearing bibs lettered with I’m a little farm product and soggy Alpha-Bits cereal.
Our sons spent their formative years in the barn’s upper level, which is where I head next. I climb the barn hill, stick my fingers through a small hole in the massive barn doors, and slide the wood latch to open a smaller entry door. There sits Freddie waiting for me. I smile, stroke his soft fur, and step into a dark, muted, almost reverent wide-open space.
This area, generations ago, had hay stacked to the rafters and granaries full of oats and wheat. But for us, the top part of the barn was our sons’ playground. To my right, a toy dump truck lies half-buried in a scattered hay bale. I imagine our boys being called in for lunch, abandoning the truck, and growing up in the meantime. The basketball hoop, old couches, trampoline, and skateboard ramps they built with their dad, still in place. I can’t bring myself to change any of it.
And this is where I knew my walkabout would end — me sitting steeped in nostalgia, glad for a good life, pondering the impressions left by past generations, and curious about the next. New owners will one day repurpose this old barn. For me, though, only one question remains, a question each of us must consider at any age or stage: Am I leaving it better for the next generation? I hope so.