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Barn Fulla Petrified Cow Poop

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

It doesn't take much to make me and Shila deliriously happy. An old barn full of petrified cow poop will do it.


Chet Baker likes those, too. We let ourselves into the lower portion of this unused barn, marveling at the dry-rotting still barked timbers on the ceiling, at the remnants of cattle long gone.


At a door that's not doing anybody much good now. The light, oh the light. Made me want to paint it right now, right now.


Vine fingers feeling their way in, finding it dark, and feeling their way back out through the barn's gap-toothed smile.


A garrotte of poison ivy hanging in one window


over exquisite hand-cut sandstone blocks.


A Valhalla for phoebes, if they can keep away from the rat snakes, which they try to do by situating their nests in the middle of beams, away from the vertical and thus climbable supports.


Shila has this thing that she does, where she chuckles continually when she's finding compositions and subject matter to her liking. I do too, although I intersperse my utterances with moans, exclamations, rarely words. We don't have to say anything in English when we're grooving on visuals, and it's just as well because when we're on a photosafari we're so far into our right hemispheres what we said probably wouldn't make sense anyway.



And the snow fell, and the knocked out panes were perfect.


as was this poor door that the wind bongled up and left for dead.


I'd never explored this barn. I guess I was saving it for a time when I could share it with Shila. 


4 comments:

Thanks for the vicarious barn excitement. And words like "bongled". And sandstone blocks I really need badly. All treasures you share so freely. :^)

Perfect prose. Thank you

The timbers and stones in that barn are truly amazing. I always wonder in awe at the craftsmanship it took to build something like that. Wow. I have always loved double doors (ever since Timmy and Lassie.)

Do Barn Swallows and Phoebe's build in the same place?

Kathy in Delray Beach

Thank YOU for reading!
Kathy, my data set on phoebe/barn swallow interactions is small, but the one instance I witnessed had a phoebe successfully keeping barn swallows out of a barn it had chosen for its own. Granted, a very small barn. More of an outbuilding. I found no barn swallow nests in this barn, only two phoebe nests. This farm is so overgrown with forest that it's not really barn swallow habitat any more (though it certainly once was).

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