Location Taken: Arcadia, Michigan
Time Taken: January 2011
There’s an old red barn on my Grandparents’ property.
It was around when my Grandmother was a little girl, growing up here on the family homestead. My great-great-grandfather (perhaps with another great, I’ve lost track), Billy Stubbs, was a civil war veteran who moved to the area to settle and farm after the war was done.
And settle and farm he did, and so did his descendents. Well, at least a few of them. The land stopped being a farm long ago. Well, aside from the old pine plantation, which still gets pruned every so often, but even then, tree farming is just plant and ignore. My Grandmother has a large garden that produces a nice quantity of fruits and vegetables each year, but while it’s quite impressive for a garden, it’s nowhere near farm size.
The land really isn’t that suited to farming anyway. It’s sandy soil, blown in from the nearby Lake Michigan. And there’s not much space between the dunes at my Grandparents. In older days, when everything was done by hand and oxen, it would have been a decent size, but in this era of large tractors and massive farms, well, it’s not worth the effort.
I think the barn held livestock when my Grandmother was a kid. I seem to recall something about cows. Or I could just be confusing things. I’m actually not sure what it holds these days. There are other outbuildings for the lawnmowers and work tools and all that. I’ve never been inside. Partly from a strongly placed feeling of “dangerous!” drilled into my head when I was a little girl being sent out to play. One of the keys to letting kids run around on their own is making it very clear what will get them hurt, and old buildings full of who-knows-what are right in that category.
Still, whatever is stored in there, the barn is well maintained and regularly painted. If what I read in some book somewhere is true, barns are traditionally bright red because that red paint was cheap and lasted well, not because it looked good. Now, it’s become so stereotypical that it’s gone through the other side to a well kept tradition. Just like my Grandparents maintaining this barn might be more cheerful tradition than sheer practicality by now.
