The Art Barn

The Art Barn

I truly didn’t know that Devin was laundering money until years later. I just figured he was doing really well at the gallery. He would come home and tell me that he had sold one of my pieces for $5,000, and I had no reason to doubt him. I thought it was because my artwork was that good.

With sales of my work humming in San Francisco, Seattle, and New York, I figured we could afford to get a nicer place. I really needed to get us out of the city. I love San Francisco, but it was dirty, loud, and overrun with drugs.

I know Devin sometimes bought pot on his way home from work, sometimes without even trying. The projects at Webster and Haight had curbside service. They’d come right up to your window and I’m pretty sure you could get anything you wanted. Now that our son Bud was a teenager, we needed to get somewhere where he wouldn’t get sucked into drugs the way Devin was.

We tried looking at adjacent suburbs, but some of the people we met were awful and it turned out that there were plenty of drug dealers in suburbia. So, I took to searching for a rural home.

After that first drive in the countryside, I was hooked. I loved the wide-open spaces, the sweet smell of hay and wildflowers, and especially all the weathered old wooden barns and sheds. I began photographing and then painting pictures of old barns.

When we found our place outside of North San Juan, I knew it was for me. The barn was spectacular. I envisioned myself painting out there, with the afternoon sun filtering in through the twisted wood. Unfortunately, I still haven’t gotten around to setting up a studio in the barn. It turns out the temperature of a building in the foothills without insulation can fluctuate from below zero in winter to north of 100 degrees in the summer. Instead of setting up a formal studio in the barn, I just went out there to paint for a few weeks each spring and fall, when the temperatures where accommodating.

When we first moved to the countryside, Bud acted like we had cut off his feet. He was spoiled by then. It was my fault. I wish I’d instilled a work ethic, but somehow instead I had installed a sense of entitlement.

I half seriously considered planting produce on the farm, just so we could require Bud to work. We hadn’t bought a farm so we could grow food. We bought the place because it was remote, cute, and affordable. I imagined myself telling Bud, “Someone has got to weed the spinach patch!” That would get him off the couch.

I couldn’t tell Bud we’d moved to the country to keep him from finding drugs. I didn’t want him to know and then later in a rebellious phase pick up heroine, just to spite me. Instead, I told him we had moved to the country for my art.

A while after we moved in, we had a scare with Bud’s mental health. At first, I thought he was just acting out because we had moved him away from his friends. But the night he woke up blubbering about a dog that had died, I started taking it seriously. We had never had any pets, not even a fish. I tried to find a psychologist, but there we were in the middle of nowhere, so I eventually let it go.

After the night Bud found the puppy in the barn and was certain it was the dog from his dream, I decided to just back away from the whole thing. I didn’t want to fight with Bud, and I didn’t want to lose the positive direction the dog had sparked in him. To be honest, Bud believed so completely that Honey was meant to be his dog that I believed it, too.

At Devin’s insistence, we put “puppy found” posters all over the county, even in Nevada City, but no one ever claimed Honey. I was grateful. Devin was sure Honey was a purebred dog so would be valuable and would be claimed. I was glad that Bud had managed to prove Devin wrong. Maybe there were wild purebreds out in this part of the world.

Eventually, the “sales” at Devin’s studio dried up, and he admitted he had been laundering money for the neighborhood drug dealers. I was surprised they had enough profit to need to launder, but he assured me that we were only one of the businesses that they used.

We easily got over the loss of Devin’s income, since the sales of my work from the other galleries was legitimate.

A few years later, we were planning our 20th anniversary, and Devin suggested a second honeymoon. I loved the idea.

We brainstormed different vacations, but then I remembered my parents taking that round-the-world cruise. It seemed corny, but I wanted us to take the same cruise. Bud was 18 now, and the only thing holding us back was us.

We booked the cruise and then devised a way to break it to Bud. I really wanted him to remain on the farm. I worried that he might want to move to the city to go to school, and that going away to college would lead to him getting high. I wanted to be in town if that happened, so we asked Bud to take care of the farm while we were gone. He agreed.

If I had known what lay ahead, of course I would not have gone. But I left the farm with a bounce in my step as we headed for our honeymoon, looking forward to the best time of my life.

The End (for now).