My Grandfather Walker's Barn (c) Nita Walker Boles

When I remember Missouri, my mind touches only briefly on the road trips back there from Denver, to see our grandparents. It wasn't the trip we cared about. From the moment we entered the long, low burgundy Hudson Hornet we anticipated that final turn leading past a virtual hedge of irises down the long, graveled drive, past the tall canopy of a tree.  An empty wooden swing  beaconed a turn before we ascended the steps of their little cottage with two front doors.

Our grandmother kept a clean home, adorned with hand embroidered and crocheted table toppers, chair arm protectors, and pillow slips. There were always sweet cakes, and good, garden grown and canned food.The bacon and eggs served for breakfast were gathered and procured from the chicken coup and pig pen. 

She and our grandfather raised and put away nearly everything required to sustain themselves, and even into the early 1950's did it all without running water. A hand pump rested outside on the stump of a hardwood tree that must have been 15 feet in diameter, just outside the barn. 

Before our grandparents installed indoor plumbing, I required an escort to keep the geese from biting me as I made my way to the outhouse. It required someone old enough to assure that neither the geese nor the chickens escaped through Mamaw's gate.   

A few yards to the right as you entered were the wooden gates that defined the pasture and coral area of the farm.  Within a few steps was the massive and perfect barn, painted just the right shade of red rusty red. The door was open if Papaw was  doing his work, which was nearly alway, during the day.

Its' heavy beams seem to have emerged from the ground beneath them, a patina of age casting a golden hue over their sturdy wood grain from the light of the open stalls and doors..Those beams bore the hulking length, breadth. and height of what seemed to be an ancient inverted ark. 

It could have been. Papaw's animals did as he bade them in his murmured tones. He seemed to have two of every animal it its' own kind, so far as a farm could need.   The work area and the several stalls were purposed and economic. Papaw would tolerate neither filth nor disorder in his barn.  

But we were city kids, so we did not frequent the lower half of the barn, except as access to the loft.where we spent as much time as possible. With our nephews, who were more country kids, we enjoyed more of Christmas or Thanksgiving in the barn than at the house.

We ascended the stairs to the mammoth second story loft. A shaft of sunlight followed the lintel through the hay door,* illuminating the same kind of hay that Rumplestiltskin must have spun into gold.  High above our heads the gentle cooing of white doves assured the peace found there where the giant rafters came together as a steepled cathedral. Only a few times do I remember the boys ever being elsewhere when I stole there for sacred moments roo read a Louisa May Alcott book in that hallowed atmosphere.

But together, we were a troupe, and so far as we were concerned, the only purpose of the first story was so that we could reign above, and freely as kings and queens, or more often, as cowboys and Indians over our various territories.  The bales of hay, with quite a bit of effort when we were very little, could be pushed around to define borders  or to make rooms if playing house, or to make castle walls. 

Since the boys were younger than we were we could sometimes coerce them into playing house with our dishes and babies. They would first agree, but couldn't seem to get our serving them pretend food on our new dishes while we held our babies around the stomach on one hip. They looked quizzically at us as though we had lost our minds. If we had been better planners, we might have begged some of Mamaw's banana bread or rum cake to make them want to play girl-stuff with us longer. .  

If bows and arrows were part of the boy's booty, they would could work for a castle theme if we could persuade them.  But the most exciting and action-packed fun was, of course, based on the old West. If we didn't want to  have to  do dishes for hanging around the kitchen with the grownups who just wanted to talk and make us work, we had to blend in with the boys. 

So many a little boy and girl fell a casualty to gunsmoke. Although the boys might be the recipients of two pistols and a rifle complete with a hat and chaps, the girls made sure they lent what wasn't necessary to sustain their own lives in the gun battles awaiting. And considering the stakes---one could be kilt, shot daide, or at least wounded in the fray--all hands would be needed either as posse, gang members, or as Natives.

Our adventures took hours and even days. In one such battle, my little brother's gun fell from his hand into the baled hay, disappearing completely. Though I surrendered the second half of the pearl-handled 6 shooter set without his having to ask, his face showed his agony with tears held back.

We all abandoned our fun and searched for what seemed like hours. Finally we were called in for supper. When he told his tale of woe, no grownup offered to  help find the lost treasure. Subsequent searches while playing never yielded the treasure, and years later when our grandparents had grown too ill to keep it, no mention of the gun was made on the sale of the Edenic farm and barn. 

Just a few years ago, while reminiscing about that wonderful barn, my fifty-something, accomplished and successful brother looked wistfully into the distance and asked  "Do you suppose anyone ever found that gun?"

Post Script.

A few years ago I visited the farm on an anniversary trip with my wonderful husband, who drove me to Missouri and helped find the farm. I have pictures fifty plus years after these  events. The barn was made of wood and may have had tin over the roof--but I don't remember a tin roof, ever. But on our trip back, the entire barn enveloped in tin on the outside. 

The property, while inhabited, was not the ordered place we knew. But I ventured a peak inside the barn. The wood skeleton, stalls, and pens, were as I remembered them, the same hard woods still preservered but showing more age than I expected. I didn't go into the loft. but looking up at the ceiling which would be the loft floor, it appeared to be again, the same wood, aged.

Without condemning the owners at that time, I have to say, Papaw would never have stood for the disorder and decay I saw. But had Papaw lived on, and on in that same place, that same age, and maintained his barn and his idyllic life, nothing would have changed, would it? 

*Now, readers of the younger, helicopter generation, take heart. 

The open door of the barn loft was not a danger  to  us. We never fell out one. In fact we never got near one because we didn't want our parents to kill us if we survived the fall.  

Mary, my older sister, remembers there was  a rope to swing from on a rafter above, but Papaw must have put it up with all of us coming, worried there could be a hanging in the next episode.

 As for the cap guns, the grownups must have figured we would never make it from the house to the barn without discharging all the rolls of caps they came with. They seemed unconcerned that all that hay could catch fire up there.  And they never helped us at all with loading them properly so they wouldn't go off most of the time anyway. Maybe that's why the barn is still standing.

So you see there is nothing to worry about here.