Barns

They were always there.

A consistent backdrop in the way of our life. A stoic prop of the Valley.

Barns.

There were little ones, big ones, old ones, new ones, red ones, blue ones.

The red ones were my favorite, because we had a red barn. The Hop House. Built around 200 years ago, in the middle of the “Hop Belt” in Central New York. My father, the well-versed historian he is, was sure to educate his daughters on the history of our hop house, and the antiques that were found within it. He was always walking us through the barn, explaining what piece of bygone equipment did what and how each part of the hop house was used in the process of making beer.

I loved the hop house. I grew up in that barn. When I was young, my cousins and I would play there, riding our bikes around the squeaky wooden floors, creating imaginary story lines of the lives we would someday live. The hop house was like our self-created playground, keeping us occupied and out of trouble for hours. As I got older, I began to explore the upstairs of the barn, where my father kept his collection of acquired antiques. The hop house soon became the “cool” place where I would take my high school friends. It became the backdrop and inspiration for art projects and now framed photographs. My father strung Christmas lights along the ceiling and tailored lights to shine on different areas of the barn to create a dramatic nighttime effect. The hop house at night was pure magic and one of my favorite places to be. To me, the hop house served as an iconic symbol of home. We held my high school graduation party there, retirement parties, and milestone family birthdays. My father built a staircase to the “loft” of the hop house, the highest elevated point, and it became the place where we would share a beer or two on a cool summer night. The hop house was the happiest of barns.

Close to 20 years ago, my parents bought the parcel of land adjacent to our house. The land came with another barn. A retired dairy farm. Demolition began right away with removing the bull pen addition, taking down the silo, and relocating and reusing the calf barn for my sister’s off grid cabin. My father’s vision was to gut the barn to its original post and beam structure. Little by little, the new and ugly parts of the barn were taken away, and the main structure of the barn was all that remained. This became the Big Barn, and my father worked tirelessly at restoring it to its old and beautiful bones. The hay mount came down, the cow stalls came out, the metal siding was replaced with lumber logged from our woods out back. The only thing that remained intact were the beams. My father thoroughly explained the historical importance of how this barn was built in a post and beam format. Post and beam construction is a building method that relies on heavy timber framing to form the skeletal structure of a building or barn. Post and beam barns are examples of exceptional structural integrity that allow for open floor plans and high ceilings. Some beams of the Big Barn were over 50 feet long, and the ceiling was well over 30 feet high. The Big Barn was a structural marvel, and my father had big plans for her, as I had some of my own.

My father and I would scheme and dream together that the barn could one day become a brewery. The local brewery boom was in full effect, and we truly believed our barn could become the next one. With the hop barn next door and the hop yard that my father maintained annually in the backyard, it would be perfect. But it would also be a lot of work, and as more small breweries opened up around our area, we scratched that idea. As the years rolled by, and as I reached more of a marriageable age, my vision of the barn shifted from a brewery to a wedding venue. How did we not think of this before? The Big Barn would make the most perfect wedding reception venue. I took mental notes of where the band would be, where the tables would be set, where the food would be served, and how the courtyard would look all lit up at night. I knew deep down in my heart that the Big Barn was where I would someday get married, and I set out with my father to make that dream come true. Even before I got engaged, even before there was a wedding to plan for, my father would run ideas by me to ensure that this was what I wanted the barn to be and look like on the somewhere down the road “big day.” It was a sweet and endearing labor of love, that became all too real once I finally did become engaged. Our dream now had a date.

I could not imagine getting married anywhere else then by a barn. Our barns. I grew up in a barn and I would get married by one. To me, a barn is where I feel the most natural, comfortable. How the smell of old wood on a hot summer’s day can take me back to riding bikes with my cousins or loft beers with my father once I was old enough to drink. Sometimes I will just sit in the stillness of the hop house, walking the aisles of my father’s collected antiques, always thinking back to a much simpler time, and how I wished I lived back then instead of now. Sometimes, I will walk over to the Big Barn just to simply be in it. Look up into the high ceilings, admire the thick old beams, and pretend I am in a wooden cathedral. The barns make me understand that I am a small and vulnerable being, in this big world of things. It is the barns that give me a sense of peace and hope, when it feels as if there is none outside of their walls. The barns ground me and bring me back to my original core. The barns are always there, even when others aren’t. Trends may pass, tours may end, stories may die, but the barns will always live on. They will always stand their guard.

My father has made it known that his favorite sound is the sound of rain drops hitting a tin roof. Not just any tin roof, but a barn roof. When it rains in the Valley, I always know where I can find my father. In a barn. Upstairs in the hop house, on the drying floor, lies a two seated swing. One of those old swings that rocks side to side, not back and forth. A swing that you might have found on the grand front lawn of an old money house at the turn of the 20th century. When I was little, my father would take me to the hop house on rainy days and we would swing, listening to the rain drops hitting the tin roof. Sometimes it was a hard rain, sometimes it was a light rain, always a different rhythm, always a slightly different sound. Always the same feeling. Always that same feeling of youthful magic, of a little girl’s smile, of a father’s pride. Always that same smell of musty rain mixing into the worn-out and weathered wood. Only that smell from within our barn. Only that sound from on top of our barn’s roof. There is a comfort in knowing that the barn will always give us the gift of these memories, and the room to make more. Maybe it will be a wedding, maybe it will be showing my kids and then their kids the beauty and history that these barns hold. Maybe it will be a rainy day, when all you need to feel right again in the world is a swing and the sound of rain on a tin roof.

Maybe it will be the squeak of an old barn floor, always sounding like home.