The Old Barn
Uploaded by pharaoh on Jun 05, 2002
Charlotte Johnson, a kind and loving mother of two, looked at the old barn and realized it would soon fall down. It was in a terrible state of repair. Its wooden foundation had long since rotted away, and the building now leaned unsteadily to one side. The boards, many of them sun-bleached, were loose and old. Several of them hung by only a single nail. Occasionally one of the dangling boards would mutter in protest, and then clatter noisily against its neighbors as it was set in motion by the wind.
The barn was the only remaining building on what had once been a wealthy dairy farm in upstate Pickering. That farm had originally consisted of more than a thousand acres, but now only a single acre of it remained. A neighbor had purchased the rest of the property long ago. He was a very close friend of Charlotte. Because he considered the barn a liability, he had never purchased it. No one else wanted it either, and several years after the owner died, the city foreclosed on it because of unpaid taxes. That was long ago, and the city had been trying to sell it ever since.
She stepped off the gravel road and waded through the knee-deep weeds as she walked toward the crumbling building. She wanted a closer look at it. It had a history few people knew about. She had lived in this area all her life, and had seen the old structure many times, but it meant nothing to her, that is, until yesterday.
As she went inside, she found that most of the interior was still intact, although everything seemed extremely delicate. She looked around, wondering what it was like to be there in the past, thinking about life in general. She climbed to the hayloft and spent several minutes there. As she studied it, she realized that she must be careful where she stepped. It, too, was rotting away. The floor looked very unsafe. Softly, she bent down and touched it with her hand. It was quiet. Only the whistling of the wind as it forced its way through the cracks in the rotting walls broke the eerie silence. She became frustrated that the barn would not tell her more, frowned, and went outside.
As she walked around the building she stopped several times and laid her hand against it. She wished she could somehow communicate with...