Trending
Brian and I wandered around the old farm where he grew up.
"That second-story on that section of the house wasn't there when we were kids. We'd climb out a bedroom window on the other section and slide down the roof onto the gas tank below."
Presumably when his mom wasn't watching. Mothers tend to have this thing about boys sliding off roofs onto 500-gallon tanks of flammables. We never understood why.
We peered inside the old dairy barn. The cows have been gone for a couple of years now, but decades of dairy aroma lingers.
Above the empty stanchions is the hay loft, where many hay forts and tunnels and kingdoms were built. Hay bales are giant Legos for farm kids.
We craned up at the towering silo. "We never climbed up that one. Well, never when Dad was home." He chuckled that farm kid chuckle as he repeated, "Never when Dad was HOME."
"We never climbed up that one. Well, never when Dad was home." He chuckled that farm kid chuckle as he repeated, "Never when Dad was HOME."
I wanted to ask what the view's like from way up there. But his dad wasn't home -- it was the day of his memorial -- and I feared that Brian would invite me to find out for myself. We're both in our mid-60s now. Climbing carpeted stairs inside a 1 1/2-story house is enough excitement to satisfy my need for danger these days.
Brian pointed to where a corn crib used to stand. "When it was full, there was just enough room between the top of the corn and roof to shimmy through on your belly."
I didn't ask why a kid would want to squeeze between a dusty, unstable pile of field corn ears and the peaked roof of a corn crib with exposed nails and wood slivers. I knew. I'd been a farm kid myself once. Applying reason and logic to an adventure ruins the fun.
"I once dug into corn in our crib and uncovered a rat's nest," I said. "A whole bunch of squealy baby rats. Cool."
Actually, I squealed too and jumped out of the crib, but Brian didn't need to know that. It was a long time ago.
Buildings crop up all over farms, and every barn, garage, crib, shed, shack and silo is ripe for exploration by a farm boy and his imagination.
When I was 6, Dad bought a little 30-acre farm stocked with buildings. One of our favorites was the chicken coop.
Built for what must have been 100 chickens, the building stretched long and low, kind of a like a rocket ship laying on its side.
There was a "people" door on one end. We preferred to squirm through the chicken-sized pop door on the back side. It was our secret entrance that we knew no adult could manage.
Why risk pulling a Winnie the Pooh stuck-in-the-rabbit-hole crisis when there's a perfectly good real door to use? If you need to know that, I suspect that you've never been a 10-year-old boy turned loose on a farm full of outbuildings.
We climbed in and out of that pop door hundreds of times. We "flew" our cobweb-lined rocket across hundreds of galaxies. We hid and found pirate treasures in the musty old straw left in the abandoned nesting boxes.
"You can't let them do that," one meddling do-gooder admonished Mom. "Who knows what diseases are in those dried chicken droppings and 10-year-old feathers the kids are crawling through?"
"Probably less than the fresh cow manure they shovel and sometimes throw at each other twice a day during chores," she said.
Farm moms might understand more about boys than I had thought.
Explore outbuildings with Cole at burtseyeview@tribtoday.com or on the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook.