Grandma's Barn

An old weathered barn stood stubbornly in the powerful glow of the winter moon. A lone owl, of the barn variety, sat perched atop the front eave like a gargoyle protecting its territory. I watched it from an old wooden picnic table in my grandma’s yard for about a half hour until the temperature dropped too low and I had to go inside where it was warm. As I turned to leave, it swiveled its stately neck and looked right at me.

In the past, going inside grandma’s house meant hot chocolate and cookies fresh from the oven, but this year, the first winter since grandma’s passing, it just meant a respite from the cold and the chance to look through the knick-knacks and memorabilia that made grandma’s house such a magical place in my memory.

There was a full moon that night and it sat just above the right shoulder of my friend the barn owl and gave him a legend of sleepy hollow look that would have put a smile on grandma’s face. Could she see it from her vantage point? – the owl, the position of the moon and all? I wondered and then I walked up the path to grandma’s front porch.

Grandma had eleven grandchildren and too many great grandchildren for this old brain to keep track of, but that meant her house was filled with endless trinkets, baubles, and assorted drawings – most of them created with the medium of crayons. And it was finally my turn to look through what had already been picked over by older siblings and cousins for those pieces that meant the most to me.

Grandma had a lot of books. Boxes of them. It always seemed like the perfect gift until her eyes were no longer strong enough to read. I dug through the boxes and recognized a few of the books from those that I had given her over the years, but I was looking for one in particular. It was a picture book of barns throughout Minnesota. Each page was of a different barn and showed a photo of it in its heyday next to a more recent photo plus a few paragraphs of history. The text was mostly just flavor but it was cute and nostalgic. My only complaint was that grandma’s barn hadn’t been included in the book. The closest barn in the book to grandma’s house was an old prairie barn over by West Concord. It was also the one that most closely resembled grandma’s barn and I always imagined that it was built around the same time and by the same people, even though I knew well enough that great grandpa built grandma’s barn just after he and great grandma were married.

I kept searching and I finally found what I was looking for in the seventh box. The book was well worn with many dogeared pages and I can’t describe the feeling of joy that I felt knowing that grandma had received so much pleasure from my simple gift.

I immediately wanted to know which barns had interested her enough to dogear the page and I turned to the first one. It was a Dutch barn located about a hundred miles south of Duluth. I didn’t recognize any of the names listed in the barn’s history, but to be honest, I probably hadn’t been paying close enough attention when grandma had told us all the different families we were related to. I wished she was still around to question.

I turned to the next dogeared page and a gambrel roof barn located just outside of Northfield looked back at me. It was obvious that the barn was newer than grandma’s as there wasn’t a lot of difference between the heyday photo and the recent one. The gambrel roof is what most people bring to mind when they think of a barn. It has the rounded roof, the large hayloft, the big sliding doors, and one or two smokestacks right along the ridgeline. It’s what the prairie barn, like grandma’s, grew into.

I turned to the next dogeared page and it was another Dutch barn. This one located near Brainerd. I sensed there was some commonality between the various dogeared barns but I couldn’t quite place my finger on what it was so after reading the barn’s history, I turned to the next dogeared page.

The first thing that hit me upon viewing the barn was a sense of familiarity. It was another prairie barn, like grandma’s, but that wasn’t what made it seem familiar. The barn itself was smaller and in a much greater state of disrepair. But it was this state of disrepair that finally keyed me into why this barn had grabbed my attention. With just the frame of the barn left standing, it was so easy to see the barn owl sitting on top, above where the front eave used to be. I quickly checked the other dogeared pages and sure enough, all of them showed a barn with an owl perched on top.

I immediately arose and grabbed my coat. I put it on hurriedly as I ran out the door and made my way up the path to grandma’s barn. The moon had shifted but the barn owl from before was still seated aloft.

“Thanks grandma,” I called out to it and my heart filled with a warm, comforting joy as I watched it blink back in response.