The Barn

When children are looking for something to do on the farm, they head out to the barn. Barns are a great adventure for every child. Inside the barn you can find cows, horses, sheep, pigs and a whole lot of creepy crawlers. Some barns have lofts where hay and straw are stored. The most fun thing to do in the hay loft is to play hide and seek. The bales were never stacked real tight so there were many holes to crawl into and hide. We had a loft we played in and one time when I was running from one side over to base, I forgot about the drop hole. The drop hole is where you drop the bales down a hole about five feet by five feet into the stall with the animals. I got to the edge of the hole before I saw it and fell right into it.

I bounced from one side to the other all the way down the hole. Instead of landing in the stall I bounced off the manger and landed on a stack of wooden gates. I did not break a bone, but man did that hurt. I got up and headed for the ladder. I was not tagged yet so I wanted to get to base. On the way up the ladder my mother yelled for supper. I could not just go back down because the other way was way more fun to get down. Every year after bailing and putting up bales, there was always a giant pile of loose hay and straw in the barn. We would all take turns jumping down the 10 feet into the pile.

As it got closer to summer again, the loft with the straw in it was usually pretty close to being empty. Now depending on who was throwing straw that year it would usually be taken from the north end first. This would allow for the basketball court to be used. Basketball court you say. Yes we had one in the loft. Sometimes we would move and stack bales close to the rim so we could run up the pile and dunk the basketball. You had to be careful though; if you hit the wall you could slide down and hit one of the barn beams.

During the summer, the whole extended family was usually together every weekend. After supper the kids headed back to the barn. Now it was too dark to play in the loft so we played down below. There were so many fun things to do. One of my favorite things was the machine that cleaned the kernels from the ears of corn. The machine had a big wheel on the side. It was hard to get started, but once you got it going, it was easy to keep it going. Once it was going you drop an ear of corn in a hole in the top and the wheels inside would peel the kernels off the ear, drop them into a bucket and spit the cob out the end.

We loved being in the barn as much as possible. Whether it was for play or for work, the time we spent in the barn was the best part of our childhood. We loved everything about the barn, cleaning stalls, moving the animals, feeding or just hanging out. The horse we had, we got from an employee that owned a few horses. This one had a disease that did not allow it to be around other horses. I loved riding her. Her name was Pepper. She was not a big horse but she was a feisty one. One day I went out and saddled her up, walked her around for a bit and then got on. I rode her around the pen a little to get her comfortable with me on her.

When my sister opened the gate we walked gently right up to the fence. I swear as soon as her nose crossed the fence line she became the buckingest bronk around. My sister told me later that I scored a good ride but the dismount needed work. She said I went up about ten feet on the air and did not stick the landing. She had to tell me because I didn’t remember; that was fun.