Morning Thanks--an old town barn

So this kid--I didn't know him, not at all--tells me, "Hey, I grew up in your house." He's not a kid really. He's maybe 25 years old. Doesn't live there anymore of course, but once upon a time, he tells me, he and I lived in the very same house, Superior Avenue, Oostburg, Wisconsin.

I wanted to change the subject because, quite frankly, I didn't like having to think about him being there. Nothing against him--I didn't even really know him; but something in me felt violated because, after all, I grew up in that house, and it pained me greatly when my parents pulled out, downsizing just as everyone must someday. 

That kid took showers in my shower, ate in our dining room, munched Cheeriors at the bar where I used to eat my breakfasts. He peed in my toilet, maybe slept in my bedroom, the strange one with the round window. My house was my house, not his; and I resented hearing him talk about it because the house I grew up is still my house. He was talking about a spiritual place as if it were nothing more than truck load of dry wall. And it isn't--in my mind, it's a shrine.

So I understand my daughter's stubborn sadness. A few days ago, the old barn out back of our old house went up in flames. It's not leveled, but it's likely not going to be rebuilt--it's probably too far gone and a century old. The present owners were out-of-state, there's no electricity in the old place, and the closest lightning that night was a hundred miles away. My guess is someone torched it, some fire bug, some arsonist.

But my daughter's near tears didn't well up because of some wanton criminal act; the sadness in her soul arose from childhood memories of the old barn out back, an old barn she holds dear. Those flames touched her very soul. . .

a good deal more than they did her father's. My wife and I raised a family in that place, a great old house with an old town barn in the backyard. We spent most of our married life there, a beautiful century-old home, a dominie's house, as a friend of ours used to say, because it felt like a manse, beautiful oak woodwork. It's an old Arts and Crafts place on a sprawling corner lot. 

It was, once upon a time, the Jongewaard house and barn, built lovingly by the town's very first veterinarian. A two-holer was built into the barn's far corner, a feature that had to be coveted in its day, an oddity I kept locked up for obvious reasons. "E. J. Jongewaard 1935" was painted on an inside wall, graffiti-ed, I should say, when someone emptied his paintbrush. The right side door out front was significantly taller than the door to its left; it was the carriage door. And the carriage side still had a manger, too. When we moved in, it still held hay.

If that old barn goes down, my daughter's father will feel some sadness, but mostly for the town. It was really part of Sioux Center's history. I won't hurt like my daughter does. She called yesterday from the driveway out front. She was looking at it for the first time, and I swear her voice almost broke--more than once. 

There aren't many town barns anymore in Sioux Center, Iowa, if any at all. It'll be a sad thing to see it go, her father thinks. After all, that old Jongewaard barn told vintage Sioux Center stories.

But she wasn't sniffling for Sioux Center. She stood there in sadness because, after all, she grew up there.

It's said that most writers really have only one story to tell, the story of the paramount pilgrimage of all of our lives, the ever difficult initiation we all have to make into the real world from the storybook of our childhood.  

My father considered the little town of Lucas, Michigan, to be his home. As a preacher's kid, he lived in a half-dozen places; but he used to say that he grew up in Lucas. In that sentence, grew up isn't something measured in height and weight. Grew up is a metaphor we all understand.

I think that's why I'm so unemotional and my poor daughter, standing right there in front of the carriage door, is weepy. 

There are moments in all of our lives when every last one of us would like to go back to some place and time that, sadly enough, no longer exists.

Such is life.

But this morning, thinking of her tears, I'm thankful for an old flame-scarred barn that will still exist in her memory even if and when it's old blackened timbers finally go down.