Origin Story Part 3: Raising the barn

Worshipping at the altar of the horse

Jerry the barn builder was horrified by my door choice.

“A glass garage door? In a barn?”

But here’s the thing about Jerry: though he (and his father before him) had been building barns his whole life—mostly cow, some chicken—he hadn’t spent any significant amount of time working in a barn.

As a kid, we moved barns a lot. It started when I was in elementary school. My mom and I were boarding her horse TJ, who had a long white nose and a tendency to be afraid of everything, and my pony, Meko, who had a flaxen mane and a tendency to try and kill me, at a long red barn behind someone’s house. One day, the barn manager Mike, who sometimes showed up very drunk, stopped showing up at all. My mom, out of necessity, started feeding everyone’s horses and cleaning their stalls, picking up grain from the feed store, and filling water troughs. When it became clear that Mike wasn’t coming back, the owner of the farm asked my mom to become the barn manager. Even though she had multiple other jobs, she said yes because she loves horses but also because it meant free board.

Over the next several decades, there were dozens of barns—always bigger, always with more and more stalls to clean, but the stalls got nicer—more spacious, with thick stall mats and heavy metal doors and, finally, triumphantly, automatic watering buckets. There were barns that were easier to work in and harder, some that had more rats than others, and one that had a resident bullfrog that lived by the tap in the wash rack that I would’ve protected with my life if he was ever threatened (which he wasn’t—even the barn cats were intimidated by him).

I grew up and went away to college, moved abroad, and got a job in a big city far away from horses. Each time I came home to visit there was a different barn and, more and more, a barn apartment where my parents and sister (who is now a professional rider) were living, which meant that 100% of their time and my visit was spent in a barn.

Eventually, I quit my city job. We bought our farm and renovated it, and so, yeah, by the time we got around to building the horse barn that I had been thinking about for two decades, I had some thoughts.

Jerry disagreed with most of them.

He thought it was indulgent (my word, not his) that I wanted the center aisle of the barn to be open. My farrier, later on, would tell me this was reckless—that a barn with an open nave would burn much quicker in a barn fire. Maybe if Jerry had used that particular threat on me, it would’ve made an impression, but he didn’t and so I ignored him.

He thought it was a bit picky of me to want there to be a hinged hay door on each stall that opened out onto the aisle, that I wanted so many, many lights, that I wanted the exterior to be all white—but it was the garage door that really sent him over the edge.

Jerry reminded me of my grandfather, who had no time for beauty. Honestly, he reminded me of most of the men I’ve been close to in my life—highly resistant to my urge to make something beautiful when possible. I had budgeted for this glass garage door, as well as for the open rafters. I had spent hours—days—years! thinking about how a good barn, at its most basic level, should work. How it should feel. What, exactly, it meant to me.

One Sunday, when I was about seven, years before she became a barn manager, my mom and I were driving to the field on my grandfather’s property where we kept our horses when she told me that someone in our extended family had pressed her on why we hadn’t been showing up to church lately. “It’s none of their business,” she said to me, white-knuckling the steering wheel, “but I feel closer to God being out in the middle of this field with my horse than I do in some church.” Just a moment before, I had been desperately wishing I was still on the couch watching Sunday morning cartoons instead of going to survive another encounter with my wild pony, but her words caused a shift in me that has remained, thirty years later. The barn is where I go to repair myself. The horses, needy and temperamental as they can be, are my great centering. This barn was not just a barn.

Jerry and his team of builders erected the barn in a matter of days, in the fashion in which barns have always been erected, which was a thrill to me as a former Laura Ingalls Wilder superfan. Seeing my barn come together in what seemed like hyperspeed was thrilling, but so was the fact that I could see Jerry start to really enjoy himself. His previous project had been a sprawling, low-slung chicken barn, and while he had been vocally proud of the sheer size of that structure, it was obvious to see he appreciated what we were doing—the beauty of the site, the airiness of the rafters. He even, to my utter shock, enthusiastically complimented me on the design of the little hay doors, which he had taken upon himself to custom build.

When the garage door arrived at the very end of the project, we stood together in the aisle, watching as it slid into place, panel by panel.

“Well?” I said, turning to him. He shook his head back and forth.

“It’s nice looking,” he said. “But you still painted the barn too white.”

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Thank you for reading! Next week: the promised post about gardens. If I knew a lot about horse barns, I knew next to nothing about building a productive vegetable garden. Subscribe to read about how, in becoming gardeners, we were gently mocked by every passing farmer with a rolled-down window, how we managed to trap a rabbit inside our the high-security fence, and more.