Feeling young and easy again, thanks to another man's vision

My family's old barn, I discovered this Easter, is going in for a makeover. The parents have retired from farming and are selling off bits and pieces of the homestead to suburbanites trying to get back to their country roots.

I half suspected the barn soon would be demolished to make way for another man's castle. The call from my parents breaking the news would be a sad one indeed, I knew. But nostalgia can't stand in the way of progress - or my elderly parents' continued good health, which such land sales ensure. Perhaps a bottle of Scotch ought to be kept for the occasion.

A boy's barn is no trifling matter. As Dylan Thomas wrote in "Fern Hill," "And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns / About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home, / In the sun that is young once only, / Time let me play and be Golden in the mercy of his means." The barn is the center of a farm, the place where work is done, where laughter is had, where lessons are learned.

Driving past two new ranch houses on what used to be our farm's cornfields, the stacks of lumber outside the barn first caught my attention. A new door made of fresh oak wood covered the central entry leading into the mow, and the dormers that I'd dumped thousands of hay bales through sported pane glass windows.

"What on earth is going on with the barn?" were my first words upon entering mom and dad's house. Forget the "Hellos" and "It's good to see you."

Our old cow dogs, a little slow from arthritis, followed my dad and I as he showed me what was under way. Someone had bought our barn - and was remodeling it to be their home.

I consider it an apt gift at a holiday of resurrection.

(originally published April 18, 2004)