I didn’t go to bed.
I walked out to the barn in my church shoes. The same navy flats I’d been wearing for eleven days, because I’d packed for the hospital in such a hurry I forgot sneakers.
The gravel turned to grass. The grass was wet. I walked the whole way around that barn with the flashlight from my glove box.
They’d done a clean job. I’ll say that for them. Every board was covered, top to bottom. There wasn’t a single drip on the old fieldstone foundation.
On the north side, the old boards were still warm from the day’s sun.
I put my hand flat against one. The way you’d put your hand on the neck of a horse.
Then I went around to the east end. And I shined the flashlight up at the haymow door.
And I found the thing that made me sit down right there in the wet grass.
Arlo’s father, Earl, painted that barn himself in the summer of 1958. By hand. With a brush. It took him all of July.
When he finished, he climbed up a ladder with a little can of white paint. And above the haymow door, he painted his initials. With the year underneath.
E.J. 1958.
Two letters and four numbers. About a foot tall. A little crooked, because he did them hanging off a ladder with a sash brush.
When Brad was little, Arlo used to lift him up on his shoulders out in the yard so he could see those letters.
“That’s your grandpa up there,” Arlo would tell him. “He climbed all the way up there when he was older than I am now.”
Brad would wave at the letters. He was three. Maybe four.
He thought his grandpa lived up there.
Those letters were gone.
There was nothing above the haymow door anymore. Just smooth, flat gray.
I sat down in that wet grass for a long time.
I’m not ashamed to tell you I cried.
And it wasn’t about the color of a barn.
It was about a photographer coming on Monday.
It was about my son deciding, in the eleven days I’d been sitting beside his father’s bed, that his father wasn’t coming home.
And it was about how close he might be to right.
Because I didn’t know yet if Arlo would ever walk again.
I didn’t know if he’d ever say my name again.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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