Out of the Frying Pan

Working in the Barn

Okay, perhaps I better clear this up before I get flack.

Yep, we went coon-huntin’. I know, I know, those cute little furry bandit-masked raccoon varmints. You, like, hunted them? Well, I know on TV and in books, they’re so cute, when the fact of the matter is, you never want to get a-hold of one or let it get a-hold of you.

But that wasn’t the reason we hunted them. Ya see, if you had a farm, those coons would get into your cornfield at night, climb up a stalk of corn, and tear it down. What’s so bad about that? Hush, now, don’t go saying nothing until ya hear the rest. They’d only take one ear of corn from a stalk they’d ruined, then they’d go on over to another stalk and do it again. So if you had enough of those varmints in there, you lost a lot of your crop in just one night.

See, that’s the reason why we hunted them, and that’s why my grandfather had Bowl. Now that I have that cleared up, can I go back to my story now?

The chicken coop was about ten feet from the barn’s left rear corner. By the time my grandpa and I would return to the barn, the dung brothers were finishing up and cleaning off the tools of their trade and putting them back where they belonged. Grandpa told me to go on up to the loft and pitch down more hay.

From the floor down below up to the peak of the barn ceiling was about thirty feet. Up in the loft there were stacks of hay bales and more hay scattered around to provide extra insulation. I eagerly climbed the ladder, looking up to see whether there was a barn owl on one of the beams. Some years, an owl would make a nest up there, a welcome visitor because they were good to have around to keep the mice or other rodent populations down.

There were two sets of doors up there, one in the front and one in the back (kinda like input/output: in the front, out the back when needed). The latch on the door consisted of a two-by-four cradled in handmade wooden hooks. There were ropes on the inside of the doors, which were attached loosely to the frame so when the doors were open, a person could pull on the ropes to shut them.

Now there was a reason why Grandpa sent me to pitch the hay down. From experience he knew if he sent one of my brothers up there, there’d be more hay flying around the top of the barn than coming down where it was needed. Funny thing I can tell you about pitching hay is, the stuff defies the laws of gravity. No matter how careful you are, you’re bound to come out looking like a scarecrow.

I found the pitchfork sticking out of a pile of hay, so I started tossing the hay down through the opening in the floor. After a time, Grandpa hollered up saying, “That’s enough!” I stabbed the pitchfork back into the stack and commenced to trying to brush the hay off my clothes and peeling what I could find out of my hair. By the time I climbed down the ladder, my brothers and grandpa had already moved all the hay to where it belonged.

As I was standing there, still knocking the last of the hay off of me, my grandfather pulled his pocket watch from the pocket of his overalls and said, “Between the four of us, we’re done in record time. It’s only a quarter ‘til eleven.” I was just grinning from ear to ear, proud to have helped my grandpa set a record of some sort, I and could tell my brothers were relieved to be done.

I made sure that Bowl had fresh hay to lay on and petted him and pulled his jowls one last time before we left the barn. We put our jackets back on and Grandpa shut down most of the lights, but left a few on so it wasn’t totally dark. We stepped back outside into the cold, kicking some of the snow away from the doorway, and with me trailing again in his footsteps, Grandpa and I made our way back toward the house, leaving Lenny and Lanny to make sure the barn door was shut and latched.

We enjoyed the quiet broken only by our crunching footsteps in the snow, for maybe about thirty seconds, when my brothers emerged from the barn and the ruckus behind us started up again. I grinned as once again I saw my grandfather start shaking his head back and forth.

Up ahead near the porch steps, I could see the imprints in the snow from my brothers’ morning follies. We climbed the four steps (visible now after being swept off) and I fetched the broom so we could all remove the snow that clung to our boots. Inside the back door, we wiped our feet on the throw rug that was there.

Once inside, I paused to take a deep breath, drawing in the warmth and the gentle scent of the cedar that covered the walls combined with the cooking smells leftover from breakfast. To this day, there is little that compares to that particular combination of smells.