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This barn, I have always called it "the little red barn," was built by my Dad and my Grandpa when I was around 6 or 7 years old. There used to be a corral attached to the right hand side and its first occupants were Dandy, the gray horned cow, Bessie, the black Angus cow and Red, the beef steer that yes, had a red coat.
This red barn has housed so many animals and has so many great memories for me. It had a hay manger built into the wall with a built in ladder leading up to the hay loft. Climbing up the ladder to the hayloft was one of my more daring acts as a child. Heights, crossing from the top ladder rung to the hayloft floor took a little finesse because of the open ended part for the hay manger.
As I got older, the daring lessened, but the quiet pleasure of sitting up in a cozy loft that smelled sweetly of hay never went away and I spent hours by barn light reading, napping, daydreaming and playing with my imagination, sometimes moving lighter straw bales around to play house, or cafe or who knows what. I did this mostly while there were cattle below. I remember one rainy Sunday afternoon I spent hours up there with Elsie, and her calf cozy in the fresh straw below. Elsie was the largest cow we ever had. She was a Simmental/Charolais mix, looked like her namesake Elsie the Borden cow and probably weighed 2,000 lbs. When it's quiet near animals, all the sounds they make can be soothing. The munching of hay, even the licking of the calf's coat and swishing of tails floated up into my little hideaway.
Here is a picture of my Grandma Perdue, years after the barn was built by my Dad and her husband enjoying some bluegill fishing at the pond.
When I was in the 6th grade, Dad and I decided to get in on the pot bellied pig pet craze and I traded a ton of NFL football cards for two pot bellied piglets. They were both incredibly shy for the first couple days, weaned from their mother but still very young. Dad and I would sit on the barn floor by the manger and gently place lettuce leaves on top of the bottom ladder rung. We would hear quiet shuffling and snuffling and before long one little charcoal gray snout would appear and daintily take the lettuce and disappear into the darkness below the manger again.
The female we named Wilma but she was not pure bred and ended up weighing about 300 lbs. By the time we bred her and had a litter we could barely give them away. One went to our family doctor and for years the pig lived on a horse farm and literally thought he was a horse. He used to sit in the apple orchard in the fall and wait for an apple to drop then get up, eat it, and sit where he was to wait for the next one to fall.
Wilma spent many years on our farm, enjoying belly rubs, leftover waffles, muffins, stale bread etc. and then eventually retired to the neighbors next door to enjoy a large horse barn of her own filled with llamas and she loved it.
The red barn has housed rabbits during my 4-H years, countless cows and calves including my three cattle 4-H projects; Buttermilk the Jersey dairy calf, Hershey, my Angus/Limousin beef steer, and Annie a black Angus heifer. Buttermilk was stubborn. She would get tired of walking around the yard and just go down on all four legs and kneel and no amount of tugging would get her up again. Then she would set her jaw and grind her teeth so loud you could hear it. To add insult to injury, she went into heat the week of the fair and kept rearing up over me in the show ring and I had no idea what was going on. Annie, I took to the fair alongside Hershey and she jumped at every sound. Only she would jump three or four times without stopping and while walking her around the yard, I would find myself on the opposite side of each yard after she recovered from the sound of a car back-firing or a motorcycle going by. Dad would always want me to let go of the lead rope lest I lose my footing and get trampled but every time she landed, I landed on my feet, so I always hung on. Hershey garnered a bit of attention in the beef barn. A rich chocolate brown, the 3/4 Limousin bloodline set him apart from the usual Angus steers, he just looked trim and was built differently. I won my class with him and the beef show in Champaign county is pretty competitive. I still remember my shock as the judge pointed to me first to signal I was to take Hershey to the head of the line. Not bad for the little red barn.
I also broke my only bone thanks to my misguided adventure with a friend who was a couple inches taller than me. It was Memorial Day weekend and I was in the fifth grade. We were keeping grain in a bin right beside the hay manger and she got the idea to climb onto the bin jump, and grab the floor of the hayloft a few feet in front of the bin, swing back and forth and then land in the soft straw below. I was never any good at the monkey bars and no gymnast. I did it once...barely then on the second time I just missed and landed on my wrist. My friend went home, I went to the Urbana emergency room and missed a season of softball.
Later when I was out of the house, the red barn was converted into a very posh dog kennel for Belle, the English Labrador Retriever, and her pups Max and Diesel and before it was a kennel, it's where Belle raised all her puppies.
And now the little red barn has been called into service again to house another kind of baby...
And here is a video...a first for the blog:
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