Remembering Home

This was the barn across a gravel driveway from the house in which I grew up. The house was built in 1868, and had a well house, an outhouse, a smokehouse, and a carriage house my father converted into a garage by pouring a rough concrete floor in it. The corner you see to the left was a small building with windows used for tools and repair. If I had it to do over again, I would try to be less afraid of wasps and snakes and explore a lot more. It was a fun and scary place to grow up- squirrels in the attic, snakes close to or even in the house (it was falling apart like the barn roof in the picture here- Dad had to go under it with a car jack and concrete blocks to prop it up at one end), massive trees to play in and under, horseshoes and Indian arrowheads and irises planted long ago, trunks and old books and black-and-white ancestors scowling down from the parlor wall, beauty and decay all wrapped up in a package we were too poor to maintain. A psychologist bought the house for enough money to allow my parents to build something new on land across the street, and she restored the old house magnificently. We have surprisingly few pictures of it. We were too busy trying to survive to take pics, I guess. But I remember it well.