Stories

Pleasures Relived / By Agnes Cigas

I delight in house-cleaning my brain. I like to reach far back into the wee crevices, pull out and dust off bits and pieces of enjoyable recollections from my childhood on a farm in Minnesota in the 1920's. Today, as I contemplate a fading picture of our log barn and the near-by new one, I long to recapture a few moments of former pleasures in them.

It was always exciting to go to the uninhabited log barn. Sometimes a small wild animal scurried out of nowhere and ran over your foot trying to escape and then disappeared. If it rolled itself into a ball and was covered with needles, it was a porcupine We kept our distance because we were told it could throw its needles at us, and that we believed because we had seen needles in the dog's nose a few times. There were good-sized holes in the dirt floor belonging to woodchucks or ground hogs, but we never saw one come out. If we spotted a black critter with a white stripe down its back lingering outside near the chicken coop, we stayed a ways from him. His smell was his identification.

We liked to climb the ladder to the loft where barn owls nested in the rafters. We always tried to count the owlets as they hatched but there never was much daylight activity At twilight we could watch both the owls and the bats circle the log barn area as they caught and ate their meals. Early in the morning we heard them calling, "Who, Who!" and in reply a distant answer, "Who, who!"

When it was time to store hay in the barn, my dad evicted the owls. They were charged with dirtying the landscape -- the cow's main meal.

After the new barn was built, the log barn became a storage place for the big machines my folks purchased at various auction sales in the vicinity. There was the binder [the pre-runner of the combine]; the hay mower and hay rake, the grain seeder, the corn planter and cultivator, and the potato digger. All of these machines were horse or mule drawn and were constructed with metal bucket seats. We'd climb aboard and try them out for size and comfort, then claim them as our own.

My folks were not into saving old buildings. They just let that old log barn deteriorate until it had to be razed. But the new red barn with its tin roof and many windows provided a new environment for play. That's where the calves lived as did the mama cats and their kittens. There were no barn owls in that barn and the beautiful swallows darting here and there became a nuisance. They mud-daubed their nests under the eaves leaving a muddy mess and white spots showed up on the red paint. My dad evicted them too.

My favorite time in the red barn was when the new mown hay was piled higher than the open door [the big door remained open all summer to allow the hay to get very dry so as not to mold]. I loved when it rained. I would grab a good book, climb up the ladder that was built onto the drop-down door and "Hit the hay!" I loved lying on my back listening to the pitter-patter or the pounding rain on the tin roof a few feet above me- out in the open, yet sheltered. I would read for hours until I drifted off to sleep.

Now, my favorite room in our house is the sleeping porch with all its windows and its tin roof. On a rainy day I will pull up the lounge chair, fluff up the pillows , grab the magnifying glass and an interesting novel to spend the afternoon in happy relaxation.