You know how certain things in life stay with you, no matter how many years go by? They settle somewhere deep inside you and become tied to a place, a time, and a feeling you never really lose. For me, one of those things was an old barn sitting on the curve just down from Bethel Church, there at the end of Pond River Road where it meets 171.
That barn had been there for as long as I could remember. Back in the 60s, when we were still living somewhere else and making our way to Kentucky to stay with my grandparents, that old barn was more than just a building. When we came around that curve and saw it standing there, we knew we were close. In a child’s heart, that meant something. It meant home was just ahead.
My sisters and I always called it the haunted barn. It had ivy crawling up the side of it, and to our young imaginations, it looked like the kind of place where a ghost might be standing in the doorway, and sometimes we would even swear we saw one in the moon light. There was something about it that seemed a little spooky and a little mysterious, but we loved it all the same. It was part of the road, part of the trip, and part of the feeling of coming back to North Todd.
That old barn had stood there through all the passing years. Seasons came and went. Crops changed. People came and went too. But somehow that barn always seemed to remain, like it had made up its mind long ago that it was going to keep watch over that curve forever.
Then today, I went by there, and it was gone.
I actually stopped, backed up, and pulled in because I could not quite believe what I was seeing. Somebody had torn it down. Just like that, something that had been a part of my childhood, a part of my memories, and a part of that road for as long as I had known it was suddenly no more.
I sat there for a minute and looked at the empty place where it used to stand. And what struck me was how quiet it all felt. It is a strange thing how an old barn can mean almost nothing to one person and mean the world to another. To some folks, it was probably just an old worn out building. But to me, it was a marker in life. It was one of those things that told me where I was, where I had been, and how close I was to the people and places I loved.
I reckon that is the hard part about getting older. You start to look around and realize the things you thought would always be there are slowly slipping away. One by one, the old landmarks disappear. The places that once welcomed you home live on only in memory. And no matter how much you understand that nothing stays the same, it still hurts when a piece of your childhood is suddenly gone.
That old haunted barn was more than wood and tin. It was part of the road that led me back to my grandparents. It was part of the wonder of being a child. And in its own quiet way, it had been standing there all those years, holding a place for the past. Seeing it gone felt like losing a little more of that old world that lives now only in my heart.
