"B" is for Barn

I know I have talked about this a little when I wrote my talk for Jan's funeral, but I wanted to make sure I said it all in more detail. The barn was a great place for playing when playing outside was required.

When I was little my best friend Jan and I would often play in the barn. Mom didn't really like us to play in the barn when it was full of hay, I guess she didn't want us falling off of the stacks of hay, but we did it anyway. We would climb to the top and rearrange the bales of hay to resemble an office or bedroom and play house or other similar game. Our favorite thing to play was "Charley's Angels." Jan was usually Kelly and I usually played Chris, because of our hair color. We would talk in the "office" and then we would climb down in an effort to go catch the bad guys on our bikes. I remember we liked to play this game all of the time, but it was embarrassing if my brother Todd ever caught us playing because he would tease us about it. So, I was always on the lookout for him. Todd wasn't very nice to his little sister. Luckily I had a friend who had no fear of the "Toidy Bowl Man" :)

The barn also housed our clubhouse. I wasn't the one who started that. I think Todd and Lesa were the ones who originally built it. It was in the side rafters where it was easy to climb up and into. Todd put up walls and Lesa painted them. Somewhere along the road it was deamed "The Plant Place." At one point we even tried to buy plants and pot them and sell them. It was fun to pot the plants, but I don't think it was a very booming business, because it didn't last (There isn't a whole lot of sun in the barn), but we had a great time trying.

The other thing we liked to do in the barn was find the new baby kittens when they were born. Actually, the kittens weren't too little by the time we would find them, They would be small, but usually their eyes were already opened. Our farm cat, Harveyetta, would find a nice quiet place in the barn to have here litter. Jan and I were determined to hold them as soon as we found out about them. I am not sure how we would find them, but when we did, we would sit outside the hole and try meowing like a cat, in an effort to have them hear us and think it was safe to come out. Sometimes we would be rewarded and one would stick its head out and we would pounce on the poor little thing, and we would cuddle it and probably maul the poor little thing to death. Usually Jan and I would argue about the sex of the said kitten, but neither of us knew how to tell. Heck, I didn't know our current cat, Mousse, was a boy until I took him to the vet for the first time. It usually came down to - if the kitten was cute, it must be a girl, and if it was ugly it was probably a boy. Sometimes we wouldn't have any success with the meowing thing so we would just sit for what seemed like hours waiting for one of them to make an appearance. When we did catch one we never took it away from their brothers and sisters or the barn, because we didn't want Harveyetta to move the whole litter, which she did sometimes. So we thought it was best to just love them there next to the hole. With kitten hunting there was never a dull moment, especially for an eight-year old.