Monday, March 2, 2009

The Tall Hay Barn

This is good picture of the tall barn from the porch of the house. The floor of this barn is all log poles laid side by side with thick, rough cut planks on top. The walls of the barn are made of rough cut planks, thinner than the floor boards, with space between each to allow plenty of air to ventilate the hay. A metal hay clamp/tong still hangs from a track running the length of the barn on the inside of the roof's peak. Barn owls have raised a brood of chicks at the top of the barn for as far back as I can remember. We have more than once brought chicks who have fallen out of the nest to Wild Life Images for care.

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Some of my fondest memories of summers on the farm is when we would bring the hay into the barn. The whole family worked together to load and unload the hay, sliding the bales along the smooth floor boards to the growing stack of hay. It made me feel important and capable to be given a hay hook and be expected to do my part to accomplish this task. Smelling the cured grass while the breeze cooled the sweat along my neck and I rocked back and forth on top of the hay bales loaded on the truck redeemed summer vacation for a girl who loved school.

One summer, after San and I came to live here, a young goat went under the barn and for some bizarre reason the goat decide to stick its head up into a crack between one of the floor logs. At dusk I heard it bleating as I put the other goats away for the night, but I couldn't find it. Finally, I located it by crawling underneath the barn. When I tried to free the goat, it yelled as if I was beating it to death. By then it was dark. I called Justin. He came and together, after several unsuccessful attempts to free the goat, we figured out the only way to free the goat was to tear the floor boards up, no small task. It took two tries to find the spot where the goat's head was. Even with the floor boards up we had to hammer a wedge between the logs to separate a space wide enough to release the horns and head of the goat. The floor still bears the wound from that ill fated act by a curious goat.

1 comment:

  1. Wow! and I always hated bucking hay, I didn't know you loved it so much as a girl.

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