bye bye barn

in december of 2006, the roof of the big old hip-roofed barn across the street collapsed. it had been neglected by the absentee landlord. shingles from various layers of roofing had fallen off; there were holes in the roof which was sagging more and more until a wet snow storm did it in. and gradually more and more of the barn fell apart.  it made me feel very sad. there is an organization that works to save barns in michigan, but it was too late for this one. the photo above shows the last part standing in mid-september 2009.

all we know of its history is that it would have been our barn, if we had lived here maybe 50 or more years ago. someone said it looked like an early 20th century structure, but i'm not sure. it was an integral part of a large working farm belonging to a family named sopp. next to it were two sheds, one for farm equipment and another of indeterminate use, and the concrete floor that was the remains of a milk house. we know that the pater familas living in our house committed suicide by hanging himself in the barn. there is a pleasant lady who lives on earhart that remembers this happening sometime in the late 1930s. she attended the little one-room school on the corner of six mile and earhart, and confirmed that the teacher at that school rented the bedroom upstairs in our house. from third to eighth grade she was the only child in her class. when she told me the year she was born, i realized that she is only ten years older than i am. yet her life as a child here in the country seems long ago and very different.

her son is part of the crew that has been tearing down the barn and sheds. fortunately, one of our friends in ann arbor came out and salvaged some of the lovely weathered barn wood to make a meditation hut in her yard. i hauled over some slender poles that had formed part of a round corral, recently built, to cut up for intermediate size firewood. i picked up a few rocks and an old rusted sickle. i've always wanted a sickle. as a good deed, i collected some dozen batteries that were lying around.

watching the process of dismantling the barn has sometimes seemed like a spectator sport, as neighbors out walking their dogs or strangers passing in cars stop to watch the bulldozer at work or the flames leaping up from the burn pile. almost all the lumber from the large barn has been burned, a lot of it at night, frightening one of our dinner guests. the crew of local guys doing the demolition job are friendly, jolly, always smoking cigarettes and willing to chat, and encouraging everyone to take away anything they like, it's less for them to deal with.

that pile above is the remains of the shed, which the irresponsible tenants renting the little ramshackled house had simply used as a place to dump their oversize garbage: several mattresses, old cans of paint, a broken rototiller, a smashed kitty carrier, some moldy horse tack, things like that, just to name a few. i didn't want to look too closely. the tenants left the first of september, without telling the absentee landlord, without cleaning out the refrigerator, and setting loose two large female domestic rabbits and 14 baby bunnies. other neighbors saw the little black lop-ears scampering under the house and called 'rabbit rescue'. two serious women arrived with live traps. they were suitably outraged; threatened to sue for animal cruelty. they went in the house, which was unlocked, to make sure no animals were abandoned inside, and reported that it stank to high heaven and was utterly trashed. people had been living there only a few days before.

 this is all that was left on september 25, and today even that is gone, up in flames or in a dumpster.

 the house is filled with fleas, bats are living in the top somewhere, and the well is polluted. the landlord isn't planning to try renting it any time soon. maybe we should be more outraged ourselves,  but mostly i am just happy that the rough-neck trashy tenants are gone and i don't have to look at the painful progressive collapse of a lovely old hip-roofed barn everyday. and, now we have a new vista from our living room across fields of soybeans to the distant forest.