Barn Country

On Saturday we made it across the rest of Nebraska, over the Missouri River, and most of the way across Iowa. On Sunday we crossed the Mississippi and entered Wisconsin, my home state. The rolling hills, tidy farms, and vast corn and soybean fields of the Midwest appeal to the farm girl in me.

Many of the old barns and silos have been replaced by metal structures, but its nice to see that there are still many working family farms here. We noted that the barns in Iowa were mostly white…in Wisconsin they are decidedly red.

I amused Eddy with stories of my childhood and growing up on a farm, pitching hay, learning to drive on a tractor, and getting trapped inside the silo room when I wandered off one morning. I was four and my sister Laurel was three. We entered the room, looked down the giant hole and suddenly the wooden door blew shut. We were unable to open it and found ourselves screaming for Mama within a few minutes. Of course she couldn’t hear us, as we were quite a ways from the house. I finally spotted a high open window, pulled up a wooden box and boosted Laurel out. I told her to go get Mama and waited for my rescue. It seems Laurel got distracted between the barn and the house and I had to wait for what seemed like HOURS before Mama asked her where I had run off to.

In addition to the scary silo, there were bats in the barn, horses that might kick you if you startled them, cows that exhaled big, hot, stinky burps, and in the chicken coop a rooster that might attack you when you went in to toss chicken feed. Nevertheless, I've always loved barns.