181- BARNS...MY LIKE AFFAIR WITH BARNS!.......

This native Virginian, during my 'blue highways' adventures throughout the rural and hinderlands, has 'captured' on film tens of hundreds of the American farm icons over the past decade or so. My like affair with the wooden 'cathedrals' continues....
The barn was the focal point of every farm and famhouse...BUT they're disappearing rather quickly for they're a pain to maintain and "them people" tear them down simply to get the cured lumber.
As a Virginian, this historian and researcher has stuck with only the ones from my State, unless on trips to Pennsylvania, West-by-gosh Virginia and New England. Our Shenandoah Valley is my fave photographing grounds, though, especially the Amish and Mennonite barns around Rockingham County.
WHY? They don't make them anymore...and they're aesthetically beautiful as utilitarian icons! I am "turned on" whenever there is a chance to wander inside one, no matter the size or location. Often, the older barns have spaces between the perpendicular siding or pieces missing creating a "cathedral" feel from the inside looking out, with the sun shining across the boards. The old barns have character and plenty of stories IF they could talk. My fave barn essay/article ever written was about my impressions, as a little boy, visiting my grandparents' barn in Rockingham County in the Shenandoah Valley. I was scared going into the old barn, but my grandmother had asked me to go out and 'fetch' more eggs from the barn for her cake...and cookies! What I discovered deep inside the bowels of the ancient barn was.....well, you'll have to wait to read The Serpentine Bond! 'cause the scene is included, like fiction, in my first novel!!! The SB has been completed, and being polished and placed onto WORD...coming closer and closer to completion. Creative writing, by the the way, is absolutely WORK! I sometimes rewrite a scene a time or three. And I sometimes feel like I'll never make it to success with my novel, BUT it will!! Also, had to add two new chapters to make the novel flow smoothly. And, for fun and practice, will also compose essays for a newspaper publication or three. My bestest essay was the research and publication last Fall of the story of Joseph Shelton Watson, a William and Mary student in 1801. He designed and sent aloft Virginia's first hot-air balloon on the Courthouse lawn in Williamsburg! Finally, this W&M college student is NOW a hero. For years, a Virginia Historic Marker languished at Scotland and Richmond Road without notice. Sadly, he died in 1805, and I have yet to uncover why at such a young age. The latest one, Waller Mill Park Trails, was just completed, after intense research and photography, between work sessions on WORD.
Now, nearly 100 essays and national and state articles have been published to continue on with my intent to learn to write many styles....everything but poetry! Am not a poet...yet.

And why do I share all of this?....to influence you, and others, to try and go after your dreams and goals...and NOT give up. An English teacher during my high school years once told me, in front of a class, that this guy would NEVER be a 'good' writer...never. She DID influence me to work, work and work and PROVE her wrong! So, YOU can have your own story to tell about not quitting one day...soon.

And BARNS, rough-hewn souls of the countryside, are honored and cherished for what's left of the icons of patina wood along the country roads far, far away from the artificial lights of the cityscapes!