This door is on the back of an abandoned barn. At some point, someone put a little padlock on it but left it open. It sets my mind to wondering, as usual. I look at an old structure and immediately I try to picture the people who built it. Unless I do some historical research, I don’t have a clue, but that never seems to stop me.
It’s always a romance. Two lovers came to this area long ago against
their parents’ wishes. They wed in
secret and slipped away during the night with only a handful of possessions. They found a small piece of land in a harsh
area and chose it for their home. The
man cut the trees down himself and built a tiny cabin for the two of them to
live in. Day by day he worked at making
the cabin and then a barn for their horse.
She gathered food from the surrounding woods and planted a small
garden. She sold what produce she could
and worked extra hours sewing for others.
Eventually they bought a milking cow and got some chickens. And their homestead became a small working
farm where they raised many children . . .
 |
| The old barn door has seen its better days. |
Or maybe it wasn’t a romance. Maybe it was an adventure. Yes! A
man was falsely accused of robbing a bank and sentenced to many years in jail. The real thief took off with all the cash
(after having paid the sheriff off) and was living like a king in Patagonia. So the
sister of the wrongly accused man slipped a file into a loaf of bread she
brought her brother to eat. Every night
he used the file to slowly work away at the bars on the window, loosening the
mortar surrounding them. Then one day he
realized he was finally ready. He told
his sister when she came to visit him, who relayed the message to his
brother. That evening, his brother came
and tied a chain to the bars. Using a
strong horse, he pulled the bars from the window. The prisoner escaped immediately, and the
three of them--the prisoner, his sister, and his brother--escaped on a ship
bound for America! They landed in Maine and built this barn to hide in . . .
Then, too, it could have been a
murder mystery. A woman pushed to the
brink bumped off her abusive husband and buried his body in a shallow grave
inside the barn. She carefully tore up
the floor boards and dug a small grave.
She put the body inside and replaced the floor boards, but somehow it
was evident that someone had tampered with them. By then, the local sheriff had grown a bit
suspicious, so she started a small cider mill in her barn, supposedly to help
with her loss of income since her husband had “abandoned” her. The press was placed right over the replaced
boards, and many barrels of apples were conveniently placed on
suspicious-looking areas. The sheriff
never figured it out, and everyone in town said it was the best cider they’d
ever tasted . . .
This door, which once kept the
outside on the outside, now keeps the inside on the inside. Its history is hidden forever, somewhere
inside. We’ll never know what happened here over the many years, but we can at least imagine
that many fine people passed over its threshold in the business of living and
dying. And at the end of the day, it’s
still a good barn.
