You Can Never Go Home Again

I found out what “you can never go home again” means when I arrived at the farm site of our childhood. The barn, looming large, the only building standing, jutted up from the bare Minnesota prairie as I went up the driveway past the grove. The tall trees and pig houses on the east side of the driveway were gone. So was the garage, the old machine shed, the shop, horse barn and chicken house. The pump house right by the barn was barely there, but some repair on the roof and door might bring it back to life.

Eager to start recreating our childhood setting, hoping to turn it into a rehabilitative ranch for youth that would employ members of our family who yearned to get back to the rich black dirt that grew us all up so well, I began unloading the trunk of my Mustang convertible. I quickly set up the tent in the orchard pulling out all the camping items needed, predicting a long stay while contractors would finish first the two-story white farmhouse where memories abound. I started walking around and sketching roughly to scale all the exact locations of each planned building, fencing and planting venture.

Fragrant apple blossoms permeated the air, bringing back strong memories about the orchard. When we were young, it was fenced, doubling as a shady horse pen. We could climb up on our dad’s big gas barrel where he would drive the tractors up to refuel and where we could get onto the horse’s back to ride bareback through the orchard. During winter our horses named Lucky, Dawn and Rory could be in the feeding lot with access to the barn and could go way out to the pasture with the cattle, but the beautiful chestnut mare Dawn would stay most of the year in the orchard paddock making it much easier to catch her to ride. My dad would use Boots in the earlier years, a big buckskin, to go out to the pasture to herd the cattle back at chore time. We had two herds of cattle, one closer to market size getting fat on the feeder lot, and one a bunch of younger calves just arriving from Out West, usually wild and ready to spook and stampede. So we kids would sometimes sit on top of the hay bales, piled about two stories high, and sing “Home, Home on the Range” to quiet them. As I walked the edge I hoped to fence extending out from two sides of the barn, I could almost smell the hay in the mangers all along the west edge of the whole fence so all of the cattle could line up at once to eat their fill. I remembered once my brother and I tried riding the several huge hogs that also lived with the cattle. We were completely mud covered when we gave up!

It was beginning to get dark, but I felt compelled to explore the barn. We had a barn dance up there in the hay mow for my 21st birthday, and that hay loft carried many other memories like playing basketball, hunting for hidden kittens and swinging from a rope swing. I passed the milk separator just inside the barn door where old harnesses and tack for the horses were hanging. To the right half-way down the length of the barn, the old ladder leading up to the hay mow beckoned; some of the steps appeared to be newer boards nailed onto the two-by-fours that extended up into the barn six feet or so above the small one-person sized square hole in the floor of the hay loft. I had to brush away dusty cobwebs as I ascended the steps of the ladder. I left a beautiful, well-designed orb undisturbed holding a big fat barn spider ready to capture his evening meal. I had learned much about nature growing up there: only tangled web weavers would hold poisonous spiders. Getting darker every minute like it does when the sun goes down on the flat, far horizon, I hesitated to climb up into that darker, very shadowed part of the barn, feeling a somewhat spooky, haunted mood created by all the ghosts of memories floating around my head like moths each taking a turn to land.

My head poked up first above the rustic floorboards dusted with remnants of hay, causing me to feel a sneeze coming. The hush of that long-abandoned roost made me hesitant to make any noise, so I crept up quietly, suppressing the urge to sneeze as best I could. Just as soon as I got my feet up to the step level with the floor, I bounced off the ladder over the square opening. Just then the sneeze let loose, and I heard scurrying mice feet on the floor and a huge whoosh above my head. High up at the top of the barn, the biggest owl I have ever seen spread its wings and swooped out of the big door used to bring in huge claw-held flats of hay bales to be stacked all the way up to the ceiling to feed those sixty head of cattle when deep snow drifts cover the grass all winter long. Owls are a very long-held favorite among several members of our family, so I was determined to get a photo, my phone great for night photography. I knew the bird wouldn’t fly far with all those mice I sensed in the barn, so I hurried down the steps, each rung difficult to grasp with the ladder almost flat against the wall.

Stalking the owl, I crept quietly out of the barn, noticing that the crunching gravel which used to be on “Daddy’s yard,” [the fun-for-play gravel and sandy dirt on very sloped terrain between the farm buildings], was nearly gone, black fine dirt having blown in from the fields in that windy, flat county side. We loved the sandy black dirt that made excellent mud pies. I got out in time to see the sun going down, a beautiful orange orb framed between the two groves. I loved walking down that tractor sized rutted path between the north grove and “Mother’s Yard,” [the fenced yard around the big white farmhouse with two porches in the front, and a clothesline and out house in the back]. Grass grew so green and thick, and we played under the lilacs in a secret hiding place. We had a little table and chairs completely hidden under the arbor the two fragrant bushes formed overhead where my sisters and I held fun dress up tea parties with our dolls.

The lilac bushes still stood there, but the fence was gone. The brutal Minnesota weather is hard on anything man made, but all of nature is well watered and endures and grows in every spot it can, completely taking over every place not covered with cement or gravel with grass or weeds poking up in every crack or crevice.

I searched for the owl in the tall trees as I watched the sun set reflecting on a stand of water covering half the field at the end of the long dirt road to the West Forty. I marveled at the beautiful pattern of orange reflected on the water between rows of smashed down corn stalk stubs left behind by the corn picker last fall. I could just hear my dad saying, “They won’t be getting the planting done for a few weeks with that much water standing yet.” He always looked at all the fields when we would drive along gravel roads going everywhere, and so we had many memorized sayings about the condition of the fields. Expressions like “The corn should be knee high by the 4th of July” were things everyone repeated. Then I heard the owl again.

This time I heard its long, eerie screech, and I remembered we used to call them screech owls. I stepped softly through the woods to where I thought the sound came from, then it screeched again so near that I nearly screamed myself. It whooshed over me again so that I could feel the wind it created on my hair. I looked up in the direction it had flown and the accommodating bird was perched in an artistic, probably frameable, pose on an ash tree which was just as beautiful with tiny, light green, lacy leaves. the owl's heart shaped face was nearly white, and the owl looked at me with his strikingly beautiful eyes. I snapped a picture, my camera at ready ever since I crossed the cement threshold of the barn door. After that once-in-a-lifetime shot, I wanted more. I took a little video of him turning his head almost 180 degrees around. Then he looked back at me, and once again flew off, this time landing lower on a tree about half-way through the other grove. His flight was beautiful, silently gliding through the thick woods without touching a branch until he landed. I quickly followed. I almost felt like he wanted me to follow! It would have seemed more likely for him to completely fly out of sight.

When I got to the tree where he perched, he didn’t budge! What a wonderful owl encounter! I couldn’t wait to tell my sister-in-law Jodi who has been an owl lover the 50 years I have known her, and my great granddaughter River who has loved them since she became an owl in her first Halloween attire she wore three years in a row. The owl kept sitting there and rotating his head down, then to stare at me again with a piercing intensity. This isn’t the first time I have felt birds were trying to tell us something, and my memories wandered away again to the time at the lake cabin when two tiny wood ducks stayed with us an entire day, even sitting at the campfire that evening with us. We felt it might be the spirits of Mother and Daddy joining us in the ducklings, especially when one nudged the other awake when he was dosing off. So I looked around to see what the owl kept looking at, then pointedly looking at me. One time a deer came out to save some children in the middle of town in time to stop a second lane of traffic from hitting kids crossing the street, hidden by the cars blocking the next lane’s view. So I pay attention to animals.

The haunted, spooky feeling still with me since the barn, I looked closely for possible danger like maybe poison ivy or something? Then, hidden in the brush, I discerned some slight evidence of an encampment like someone homeless might create deep in the woods. Looking closer, a trapdoor sized square of grass had large, sturdy hinges holding it to a board. Did I dare lift the trapdoor? Maybe I should keep watch as it gets dark, then snap a picture of anyone who appears? No, they could be dangerous.

I hurried back to my campsite and tucked my pepper spray into my jeans pocket. I wouldn’t dare sleep, so I headed right into town, leaving my tent as it stood. I headed to the mayor’s house. I had been planning to visit him the next day; my cousin Duane became mayor of the tiny town of Frost, Minnesota, population 287. I meant to ask his recommendation for contractor, carpenters, plumbers, fencing companies, etc. He serves also as the seed dealer we need for our spring planting. He said I looked white as a sheet when he told me I might have solved the search for the mailbox bombers who have been terrorizing the area. I shuddered at the thought of being alone out there with them! Inwardly, I expressed thanks for the owl warning that day and for the best owl sighting ever.