Archive for the ‘Misc. Griping’ Category

I thought it was appropriate to point out that my grandfather’s barn burned down last week.

Let me clarify. My grandparents both passed away in the mid 1990’s. At that point the farm was sold off. So, technically the barn hasn’t belonged to my family for a while.

In my heart, however, it will always be Grandpa’s barn.

Several members of my family had spent lots of time in that barn at one point or another. We’ve all milked cows, gathered eggs, fed calves, kicked around straw, and moved copious piles of animal manure in that barn. Goats, geese, chickens, cats, and cows lived entire lives in that gambrel building with the rough-hew posts and beams and the corrugated tin roof.

It was a class B milking barn, which meant Grandpa’s milk was used for cheese. His cows of choice were Swiss because they yielded a high milk fat and had a decent temperament (most of the time). He had a couple of Holsteins, but I recall they were always a bit skiddish and were hard to get the milkers on.

The gutters were cement grooves in the floor. The cows never seemed to actually poop in them, so it was a crusade to pace behind the cows during milking to scrape the fresh piles away before the cows were let back outside. Usually they’d also poop on their way back out for good measure. Grandpa had one of those old fashioned poop cradles (that’s not a technical term, that’s just what it looked like to me) that ran the length of the barn on a track. A person would drag the cradle along and shovel poop into it and haul full loads out to the manure spreader at the end of the track. In the winter the tractor never seemed to want to start, so Grandpa would hook up his draft horses to the spreader to haul it out to the fields.

It was never an industrial operation, never more than fifty cows at the most. My Grandpa died of a heart attack at the kitchen table after cutting up a pig with a hacksaw. He left 20 milking cows in the barn at that time.

That barn will always be a symbol to me of an almost extinct way of life. Family farms are still around. All you have to do is attend a county fair to see that. But the farms that were self-sustaining with messes of kids and multi-colored cows set out to pasture are a good two generations gone. In my mind they’ll never be forgotten.

So, to quote my absolute favorite line from “Steel Magnolias” (an awesome chick flick if there ever was one): “I’m busier than a one-armed coat hanger”. Sometimes though, when I actually stop for three seconds and get my bearings, I sometimes get flooded with that great sense of  “aahhh.”  That happened last night.

As has been the particular pile of crap dejour clogging the fan for the past couple of weeks, our rental house was vacated by our previous tenants shortly after July 4th, and the husband and I have been left to clean it up and advertise it for new tenants before the mortgage payment for August becomes due. It’s been two long years since I have spent more than 30 minutes at this property, but for the last two weeks, we’ve become reacquainted.

This house was the first house that I purchased by myself as an adult. I was 26 at the time and single. Young, single women buying houses is almost unheard of in my neck of the woods, but I eventually managed to pull it off. The boyfriend at the time stuck around for two more years, then we parted ways. After getting married, the husband and I kept it as an investment, lived there together for a short while, then rented it out.

Walking up the front deck to go in and lay carpeting last night, I stopped and looked around. At that moment, I remembered why I bought the house in the first place. I don’t know about the rest of you, but when I go into certain places, I get feelings that wash over me. It only happens once in a while, but when it does, I know I’m suppose to acknowledge it and do something. That’s what happened when I bought this house. An overwhelming sense of comfort covered me like a cherished blanket, and I knew I had to buy it.

That feeling came back last night, and for the first time in almost a month, I just stopped, took a deep breath and said out loud, “Anyone would be lucky to live here.” I really hope I get to pass on that feeling on to a worthy tenant.

I don’t know if any of you are old enough to remember the Gong Show (or even game shows in general. They used to fill that gap between sitcoms that reality TV shows fill now). It was a goofy talent show where contestants would perform a wacky talent (or so they thought) on stage and three celebrity judges would watch for a specific period of time, until one judge would be so disinterested he/she would get up and bang the gong behind him/her, showing his/her disapproval of the performance. It was kind of like American Idol with more comedy and a smaller budget (I remember judges would wrestle with each other to keep one from hitting the gong).

One of the acts that seemed to make a repeated appearance (at least in my fuzzy memory) was the act with the spinning plates. There would always be several dinner platters placed carefully on the ends of varying lengths of wooden dowels and spun. The object was to get as many plates spinning at the same time and remain that way for as long as possible. I remember that act rarely went well.

The thing is, one or two plates spinning perfectly is a challenge, but probably doable. The chaos ensues when you animate more plates at the same time than you are mentally or physically capable of maintaining. It’s really hard to keep your eye on all of them, and each plate acts differently on each length of dowel. Once you lose your concentration, they all start falling over. Eventually you may just say, “Piss on it!” and angrily sweep up the broken china in your disgust, knowing full well you’ll be stepping on the hidden glass shards for weeks to come, each time a bitter reminder of your failure.

My point is my life feels like a never-ending sight-gag of me trying to spin all these stupid plates, and just when I think I got it down, another plate appears. I really wish someone would just hit the damn gong already!