Bountiful Barns

Beautiful buildings in bucolic settings

My town blooms from the banks of a long and winding river. The soil is rich and fertile. There are cows down the street from me, as well as goats, chickens, ducks, pigs, tobacco, corn, and even a vineyard.

The whole river valley is dotted with old barns.

The above barn sits right near the river, next to a local swimming hole. The day I stopped to take this photo, I caught sight of a flash of feathers and spotted a killdeer nesting on the roadside at the edge of the field. She was trying to lure me away from her nest. I hope all of her babies made it.

This barn is closest to our house, on the way to the vineyard. An old neighbor used to call the stretch of road between this barn and the vineyard, “The Terrifying Tunnel of Darkness.” It’s forested and winding. We often see deer and turkeys passing through — occasionally a bear.

There are two barns at our local Christmas tree farm. Funnily enough, there is another Christmas tree farm even closer to my house, but we always go to this one. They offer horse-drawn carriage rides in the snow along with free cookies and cider. Lately, they’ve had a food truck so our son can get french fries for fuel after running around the hillside with his cousins.

I won’t name names, but I live in the same town as a well-known author. She has a few outbuildings on her property — old barns, sheds, or garages. She also has a little free library (of course). On Halloween, she hands out original poems to the children along with candy. It’s a real treat.

We pass by this corn field regularly on summer walks, and we measure time by the height of the cornstalks. They don’t show up in this photo, but there are enormous pigs living on the farm in the background.

The above photo shows one of the views from our son’s old school building (prior to our homeschooling journey). We often visited the playground just before sunset to play our own original adaptation of dodge ball.

You can see the same barn, along with a few others, from the basketball court. Unfortunately I don’t yet have a photo of the barn across the way, which is hung with a colorful mural, hand-painted by local high school students.

Happily, some local farms grow pumpkins and gourds as a seasonal crop. We go to the same place every year to choose our carving pumpkin for Halloween. The farm always has an original pumpkin-themed sculpture out front. This year, it was Mount Pumpkinmore.

There are barns of many colors and sizes in the countryside: barns for animals, for storage, or for drying tobacco leaves (we even have a farm museum inside one of our barns). They are quiet, natural-looking buildings, familiar and serene.

I love the landscape that I live in — the wildlife, hills, fields, trees, and rivers — but the barns can be a pretty nice feature, too.

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