A Lifetime Ago Runner-Up in Return of the Night Owl Challenge
The barn becomes her home when she's just five years old. The smell of horse and hay in the stalls is more comforting than the cigarette smoke and black coffee in the farmhouse - it’s more natural, more welcoming. She doesn’t go to fancy art classes or ballet like the girls at school. She makes sculptures of mud in the rain and hops and leaps with the toads by the pond. She wears dirt like a crown and fly spray for perfume. She catches lightning bugs in jars and counts stars on her back in the soft grass. The horses are dangerous and lovely, warm and soft, off-limits, and all that she wants to be around. When she’s just five years old, the barn is home and the wise old barn owl watches over her.