A Barn is Born

"It will not always be summer: build barns."

-Hesiod

In the midst of our preparations to visit my parents in Texas for Thanksgiving, with all of the fraught emotion that comes with seeing those two resilient people so frail and largely helpless, George has gone and built us a new barn.

When I think of barn building, I always picture the scene in Witness when the Amish build that barn while Harrison Ford is trying to fend off Kelly McGillis's winsome advances.

It's a scene you might encounter on any given summer non-sabbath day up in the Southern Tier of New York (the barn-building, not the fending off hot Amish women), which finds itself teeming with hard working, odoriferous Amish guys and their barefoot belles.

But in the South, we do things differently. No real human-scale labor here; when it's barn-raising day, the crew arrives with trucks and tractors and bobcats. Maybe it's an accommodation of the scorching climate. Maybe we're just a little lazy. Maybe we know ourselves well enough to realize that if you gather that many menfolk in a field in north Florida, someone's going to bring an ice chest, and a couple hours later at least one barn-builder will end up in the emergency room for suggesting Tim Tebow wasn't the greatest quarterback ever, while the barn ends up looking like this.

Whatever the reason, these TayCo types can erect a barn with blazing speed over the course of a day or so.

Remember when I posted those photos a couple days ago showing piles of lumber, metal trusses, and roof panels plopped out in the southwest pasture? Well, none of that stuff stayed on the ground for long.

Here they're auguring the post-holes for the eponymous poles.

From there the barn emerges from frame to truss to roof, as if these guys have done this before.

And then, before you know it, there's a pole barn.

On the left you can see where they've already laid the forms for the concrete pad where George will enclose a tool room for us. Looks like the John Deere has already found its way home, with the gator there next to it. Someone suggested to us the other day that we need a different gator for a wedding destination, seeing as how our old off-roadster is camouflaged and all. I don't think our advisor on this point truly understands our Big Bend audience. How does the old rhyme go, "Something borrowed, something blue, something camouflaged, bring lots of brew"? Or something like that.

So the farm equipment has a new home, George's tool room will allow us to clean out the main barn, and soon that space can begin its transformation into the site of years of future toasts and blissful smooches and slow dances to country songs. And we may even have a few wedding receptions out there when P and I aren't around.