The barn was where calves and colts were born. It was where our cats would hide in the loft to give birth to their kittens, safe from a little boy’s prying eyes. Bantam chickens roosted in its rafters after the sun sank below the horizon.

We built forts in the hay and waged corn-cob wars. Occasionally, a forgotten nest of rotten eggs was found hiding between bales of hay that upped the ante in a few of those wars. The losing army was doomed to take an early bath. A kid’s worst nightmare.

It was where we broke horses and milked the cows. My brothers and I would pin towels to the shoulders of our tee-shirts and leap from its loft, pretending to be Superman. During summer months when worms were impossible to find we knocked down wasp nests and robbed them of their larva so we could go fishing.

We were given many of our first chores there, feeding and watering livestock. Filling up the corn-crib in the fall was preceded by an annual rat killing as we removed the previous year’s corn.

When the Highway Department paved the gravel road it sat beside in the late 50s they told my father it set about a foot over the new right-of-way and he would have to remove it. As it turned out, only the front eastern corner was on state property. My father removed the boards on the east front, chopped off a foot of its face, then replaced the boards. Thus, after that the front of the barn took on a warped, haphazard look and the large doors were reluctant to remain securely on their hinges. That seemed perfectly normal to me. We weren’t perfectionist, after all.

Many of the best days of my childhood were spent beneath that barn’s roof.

After I left the farm and moved away there was no one left to maintain the old buildings. One by one Mother Nature reclaimed her ground as time passed by. The corn-crib, gin, tenant houses and the barn slowly melted into the earth as pine trees hid any trace that they had ever been there.

Before I let go of the farm I retrieved a few of the large sandstones the barn had rested on. They were placed there by my grandfather nearly a hundred years ago. These days they rest on the edge of my patio here in Kentucky to remind me of another time and another place. A time when colts stood for the first time on wobbly legs, the milk cow cried for her calf at night, kittens scampered around the loft chasing mice, and a little boy thought he was Superman.

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Rick Algood
December 3, 2020