Sometimes when I am out for my nighttime perambulation with my dog, Sweetpea, we lift the latch on the garden gate and walk silently together onto the grounds of the Mulford Farm to have a look at our old barn in the moonlight. Hush! No one tell Steve Long at the Historical Society that there are nighttime trespassers! The old barn, officially now the Hedges Barn, I believe, used to sit behind my house on the far side of the pond, across Main Street, but it was deconstructed and carted off in pieces about 10 years ago, to be rebuilt nearly from scratch by a donor at extraordinary expense on the grounds of the farm museum off James Lane.
I just like to say “hi” from time to time.
I actually say it out loud, startling the dog in the stillness of the night, under the high, cold moon: “Hi,” I say. “Hello, barn!”
The barn looks brighter and taller in its new clothes.
It is completely empty now.
One of the superstitions I have acquired with age, and with the psychological wear and tear that comes with the life-so-far of a person in their 50s — mine is a decent portion of woe and strife, just a respectable portion, I’d say, the usual, not any level of trauma or tragedy to brag about but just enough to impart one or two wisdoms — is that I do believe houses and belongings acquire something from the generations who have been there before. Some molecular diffusion, some DNA transferred with the repetitious morning and evening rub of the barn door handle by the palms of someone stepping inside to scatter straw and feed. And, I also have come to believe, a measure of emotion, a certain emotional weight — so slight as to be unmeasurable by laboratory instruments — is transferred into old objects with use, too.
The reverberations of a piano after the note has been struck.
I am not one to speak of “energy” or to hear someone else speak of “energy” without scoffing or rolling my eyes, but I saw a photograph of one of Marie Antoinette’s dancing slippers recently, pale-pink silk with wooden court heels and pale-pink and pale-green cockade ribbons over the toes, and you could feel the, you know, energy coming off those babies through the computer screen. Marie Antoinette ate celery the last day she wore those slippers, and got a cramp in her left side in the afternoon, and was melancholy in the way you are melancholy when nothing is wrong but the sky is overcast and the day drags on. She played dominoes.
I’m just completely making that up about the empress’s slippers, naturally, but my point is that I do believe against all scientific evidence that traces of long-gone people and of accumulated feeling linger, and that this diffusion and osmosis is much more a present fact than we thought it was when we were young and certain.
At least I like to pretend it is so.
Our family barn on the Mulford Farm property is an old chum. The barnyard animals had long since left the stable by the time I was 8 or 9 and came to know that barn so well, but the whiff of horse was detectable in its shadowy interior, and I don’t mean that it actually smelled of hide or dung, but that you could feel the stolid presence of the old mare though she had been gone 100 years. Patient old beast, and lonely. Her feelings were a bit hurt every time the barn door was rolled shut by the pair of working hands, leaving her alone again for the night.
This barn had — has — two haylofts on either side of the high center beams, with light filtering through cracks in the siding, dust motes floating, and the occasional swoop of a barn swallow or black bat. They swung out into the open air at twilight, and once entered the upstairs guest bedroom to flap around the room when I was entertaining my future husband. (An omen I should have taken more care to ponder!) Unlike my more risk-oblivious brothers, I only climbed up there among the rafters of the barn hayloft a handful of times as a kid, choosing my steps like a tightrope walker because the wood was rotting and there were gaps where boards were missing, down through which a child might drop and break a femur.
Next to the main barn building with the haylofts and the one stall with trough for fodder, a smaller, narrower, and later side addition was attached — the section of the barn that remains on my property today, cut away from the body like a vestigial twin. This side structure had a flight of unsound plank steps leading up to a small loft chamber where, someone told me once, the hired hand had slept on a narrow cot. (That bears investigation, now that I mention it.) In the early 1980s, one of my brothers memorably found a stack of 1940s girlie magazines up there in the hired hand’s room. History does not record if they had belonged to a hired hand or to my father or perhaps late uncle.
Across Main Street, plunked down solidly to its surprise on new footing, like uncomfortable new shoes, the big, square box of the rebuilt barn stands more uprightly and waits for it knows not what, feeling a bit perplexed by its new perspective — facing west toward the setting sun — and its new siding. It is ever-so-slightly self-conscious. As for the side structure that remains of our barn behind my house, the only inhabitants now are the brown rats, the gray mice, the black bats, and the living hantavirus. Tempus fugit but the melody lingers.