The barn measures time

It’s the smell when you first brush through the thick filtered light, where particles float through the air like lost sheep, milling about and swirling in on themselves. Cascading and twirling as your shepherd’s body brushes through them but knowing no time for the barn is their only universe.

It’s the wet of animals’ bodies pushed close together in the winter, the heat rising and evaporating off their frozen coats, having nowhere to go but to evaporate up into the old timbers, where cobwebs from decades before lace the lofts, like a poor woman’s thread woven into a beautiful woman’s gown. In the summer, the barn becomes dusty and cool, a paradise for young feral kittens with murky coats and wild eyes. It now smells of ancient golden straw, of worn wood rubbed soft, and of hard water, crisp and sulfuric.

And within the summer’s barn hang the cobwebs, vibrating in the heat of the barn’s old heaving body and trapping the fleeting pieces of summer within her net. There dangles little butterflies and young leaves from saplings growing down by the water, flies thrash viciously as the huntress patiently waits for them to realize that everything has become futile, despite the fact that the meadowlarks still chirp audibly on the fenceposts and the coyote pups howl in the nearby canyon at night. Still the fly thrashes, tearing its wings yet the web holds tight unperturbed.

Unexpectedly, a woman’s sandal is hurled through the spider’s web, tearing down a good business-weeks’ worth of work. The huntress angrily retracts herself into the woodwork as the now-dead fly unravels to the ground, landing on the straw-hewn floor with its rotting planks, and heaps of small bones and garlands of purple alfalfa. The woman is the farmer’s wife, and she can’t stand the ugly fat-brown barn spiders that spin their webs in the double-paned cheap glass windows. She does not know of the long nights the barn spiders spend spinning their webs by moonlight, their bodies quivering with the effort, constructing some divine map provided to them eons before the farmer’s father’s father arrived on the stolen land from far across the lapping Ocean. The woman only knows the spider for their hideous bent bodies, she fears they will fall carelessly into her hair, in the same way she carelessly destroys their webs, one sandal at a time. If the woman has considered the consequences beyond that – it remains unknown to the barn spiders. They are simply the gatekeepers into an unforgiving and forgotten realm, and they will continue to spin their webs, and watch the years pass and the webs accumulate, and the animals and generations of farmers drift through, until time itself ends and the barn collapses in on itself like a small supernova of red paint and crackling white trim.

The farmer yearns for the barn in a way that never crosses his mind. It has become part of his soul and will always be a refuge for him. He carefully repairs and replaces the aging timbers in a way that he could never repair his own crumbling life. He knows the spiders, and he quietly weeps alone in the cool shadows of the barn, when of the calico kittens succumbs to a harsh early winter. As the lines grow deeper on the farmer’s face, and his back slowly crumples, the barn looks on watchfully for the barn too knows the farmer and the barn has seen his fate.

The barn has watched the farmer bring life into the world in the small humble barn beneath the lunar halo. And again, in the cool electric lights, on a sharp February night, when the moon dares not to shine. The barn has seen the life and the barn has seen death borne on the back of small senseless animals, the reaper standing in the corner holding the barn’s own scythe. The wild northern cows who would rather have their babies in the cold, dark snow, run tormented through the barn’s labyrinth of pens and pails and scattered barn cats. They hurl their square bodies over fences, and crash through softer more forgiving implements. Their scared eyes show no fear but only survival. The barn is a cradle but also a catacomb.

And I stand further back from the melee with my child’s eyes and I watch what the barn knows. I watch my father bent over a newborn calf pleading with it to live, it’s hair not yet dry from the ocean it was shaped within. And the light has softly been blown out of the calf’s eyes, and my father sees it and the calf’s mother sees it, and the barn and the wood-brown spiders see it, and we all struggle to breathe at the pain of it all. A new life with a light never lit but still blown out just the same. The timbers creak and sigh under the weight of the winter storm howling outside. Blowing spells into the barn through long-forgotten cracks in the wood. And I watch as my father pleads with the calf to live, yells at the calf to live, and walks silently out of the barn when the calf dies. My father doesn’t look behind him as he leaves. But the barn knows he will be back, he always comes back.

And the years pass over the old red barn standing quietly beneath the galaxy, on a little brown plot of land sometimes green. And the coyotes howl on, and the migratory birds always find their way home, and there are good years and bad years and sometimes the well runs over and sometimes nothing grows and the land turns to a blowing desert. And we are old now, and the barn is older still but still it stands. Within the barn, the calves are born in the spring, and the spiders spin their webs, and nothing ever really changes in the barn, and now the farmer can no longer remember his own name but still he remembers the barn that his father’s father built.