The Barn: Saying Goodbye

Yesterday, our Farmer's son pulled down the remains of the old barn.  He'd salvaged as much as he could of what had been stored inside it for nearly 100 years.  It's been a slow process for him as he dealt with his job, putting both of his parents into nursing homes in the last three months along with the rains and the heat and bugs of a Florida summer.

If David was home while work on the barn was being done, he would spend a lot of time just listening to Douglas as he talked about his memories of that old barn.  How Mr. B showed him how to garden and to work on farm equipment; how he was dared by Mr. B's daughter to ride his bike out the hay loft and onto the ground below, how his Dad and his brother and a couple of others used tractors to pull it back up after Hurricane Dora in the 1960's.  

There are things we can't get to working on ourselves until that old barn is completely hauled off.  We can't have our concrete slab hauled off nor can we get the old metal shed pulled out.  There is a pecan tree on our property that is now leaning so far over with compromised roots that we have a tree guy coming on September 17th to take it down...but David empathized with Douglas and practiced patience as he waited and listened to the recounting of memories as he worked through his emotions.  We all went through that Tornado and its aftermath, but Douglas's journey is different than ours.  He has a lifetime of memories tied up with that old barn and the house he grew up in across the street from us; a house that no longer has both his parents there with him.   He is hauling away bits of his childhood.