I’m continuing my love affair with great barns, they are disappearing rapidly, like the family farms they were built on. The old ones collapse in heavy snow, are blown over by hard winds, are sold to builders and carpenters for the wood, or knocked down by new home owners, destroyed by fire, collapsed of their own weight, rotted by the rains.
Some just tilt over until they collapse onto themselves.
The second owners who often buy the old farms when they go under have little use for barns, they are a hazard and expensive to maintain. You can’t keep cars in them and there is no need for hay.
Insurance companies never like them and get them knocked down whenever possible. When I was looking for insurance for Bedlam Farm, two insurance companies said they would only insure the farm if I knocked the barn down. I said no.
The old barns are the habitat and shelter of all kinds of creatures – barn cats, rats, mice, bats, swallows, spiders, raccoons and skunks. If you close your eyes in an old barn, you can hear all kinds of creatures skittering and flapping around.
I have a great compulsion to photograph them whenever I find them, they just ooze character and memory. As I’ve written, I see nostalgia as a trap, a hiding space for people who hide behind their fear of change.
Everything has its time, including us, and it is not for me to say the great old and beautiful barns should stand forever.
That is not up to me. I hope they outlive me by a good stretch, they connect us to our heritage and memory in very powerful ways. Some of them will live her, on my blog, for a good long time I hope.
These past few days, I’ve spent a part of the early evening – my quiet time – with the singer Gillian Welch, and today I listed to “Hard Times” a half-dozen times and loved it so much I wanted to share it with you.
Maria put her new weaving loom together in about an hour, I was impressed and pretty much useless. I waxed the wood and held the frame while she tightened the screws, but she was like one of those Big Men In Trucks – she looked at the instructions, which utterly bewildered me, and just breezed through it.
We ended up having an especially relaxing day. It was supposed to be a loom day, but Maria got sick and was in bed half the day. That did help us to relax. I ran around like a fool for an hour or so, running errands, picking up my photo prints to be shipped out from George Forss, then stopping to help Maria, feed her and get her to rest, and in between, reading John Le Carre’s new novel, Legacy Of Spies.
I am excited to meet George Smiley again.
So we have a new table loom, rather Maria does, and she is excited about it. She has to learn a few things about this simple Ashford loom, but she has done some weaving before, and she forgets nothing. I can see that it means a lot to her.
“Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.” – Rumi
I know nothing about garlic except that I sometimes buy it at the supermarket and put it on the pizza I make in the winter. Edwin Schiele and his wife Debby Jaffe run Long Days Farm, which has the classiest and most artistic stand at the Farmer’s Market, which is open in our town on Sundays.
Long Days is a small farm at the southern tip of our county. Edwin and Debby started as home gardeners and have stayed faithful to that, they love fresh vegetables, sell eggs and organic chicken feed, tomatoes, onions, eggplants, pole beans, yellow watermelon and fatali.
We get fresh fruit, vegetables, bread and Round House Pizza every Sunday at the farmer’s market, I wish we could eat that well all year.
I never thought about buying garlic, but Edwin’s stand is eye-catching. Apart from the garlic in the stand, there are beets and peppers and raspberries that melt in your mouth. But the garlic stands out.
My photographer’s eye keeps drawing me to Edwin’s stand, his daughter Anna, I believe, helped him to design it – his stand was very different last year.
Farmers are not known for their design sense.
Their displays are clean and attractive, but spare.
The first thing Edwin’s stand did was make me want to take a picture of it, I never imagined garlic looking so good. Then, I found I am starting to get interested in garlic. I’ve been reading about it. In my family, i do the shopping and the cooking, and I’ve started to explore the different kinds of garlic – there is a pamphlet at the stand and read about them.
Long Days sells hard-neck garlic. The plants produce scapes (curling green stalks with a seed heads on top) that they sell in the spring. Most of the garlic grown in the U.S., says their pamphlet, are soft-neck, which grow well in mild and dry conditions, especially California.
There is, of course, even a Garlic Seed Foundation, a non-profit cooperative devoted to the love of good garlic food. I never knew. I think the best things in the world are driven by people like Edwin and his family, bringing passion and creativity to the things most of us would never otherwise know or think about.
That is also why I love living her – people like Edwin are drawn here to live their lives.
Edwin sells five different varieties of garlic, all display in tilted baskets, along with vegetables and berries that are grown on the farm.
This kind of creativity and imagination – and commitment – always inspires me. I’m with Joseph Campbell. If you work only for money, you are just another kind of slave.
I’ve been shopping at farm stands for many years, and I’ve never seen one that looks quite so colorful and distinctive. Farming is an intensely creative work to begin with, I think every farmer is an artist, one way or the other.
When I find myself drawn to taking a photo of something, I am eventually drawn to figuring out why.
Edwin loves to talk about garlic, and urges people to grow their own. I keep taking his photo, and I figured it was about time to focus on the garlic.
Imagination is everything, said Albert Einstein, it is the preview of life’s coming attractions. I think I’m going to be cooking with garlic soon.
When I got up this morning, the Gray Hen had disappeared. She is never in the roost any longer, she is always by the back door with Minnie, the barn cat. She gets fed there now, I looked for her in all the usual spots, but no hen. I told Maria I thought she had been taken by a fox or coyote or hawk, she is always by the back porch now.
After four or five hours (I looked on and off, not continuously) I decided she was almost certainly dead, I wished a peaceful and quick ending for her. I was thinking about what I might say about her, I don’t usually write much about chickens, dead or alive.
When Maria and I went out to look for her one last time, or for traces of her, we wound her sitting by the Schoolhouse Studio looking curiously at me.
She seems to have disappeared again. She is not broody, this is a very different behavior. I don’t think she has long to go.
