A Barn in New England: Making a Home on Three Acres

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winter

We saw the pine trees first. A hundred years before we arrived, someone had planted a row of pines as a windbreak to the north of the barn. They were spectacular, tall, green masts reaching up two hundred feet. Their southern branches extended toward the barn, reaching across the plowed drive. Two low limbs brushed the top of our Dodge pickup as we parked. When we turned off the engine, we heard nothing at all.

    I looked up through the windshield at the barn, the white barn, four stories tall. I could not quite believe the size of the building, the thought that I could own such a thing. It might have been drawn by a child: straight lines, a cupola on top, wide, welcoming doors overlooking a broad meadow. Surely we had drawn this building ourselves, imagined it a thousand times in our secret hearts, added a strand of chimney smoke above it, a bright, smiling sun in the sky. Brown crayon wedges for birds. More wedges, impaled by a brown trunk, to form pines. A stick figure dog beside a stick figure mom and dad.

    "Well, what do you think?" Wendy asked, her eyes locked on the building.

    "It's huge," I said.

    "It's enormous. It really is a barn."

    "That's what the prospectus said."

    "I know, but it's strange to see it here. In wood and stone, I mean. It's a barn. We could live in a barn. It hasn't quite sunk in yet."

    "I know what you mean," I said, and I thought I did.

    We leaned closer to the windshield to get better views. I wanted to get out, to walk around, but something held me back. Maybe it was the worry of rushing toward some good thing you knew would happen. It was like savoring the moment before you open a letter from someone you miss or who you knew was sending you excellent news. We continued bending back and forth, trying to get our vision around the height of the building, the wide ship of it as it lay in the white meadow. As we looked, the truck clicked and began losing heat. A few dollops of snow fell softly out of the pines whenever the wind blew, depositing white egg cups on the hood of the truck.

    "Ready?" Wendy asked.

    It had been her idea to come early in order to look at the place before we had to talk it away. Our appointment was for ten, and we had twenty minutes to walk around. She grabbed the prospectus and slid the roll of papers up the sleeve of her ski parka and then she was out the door. I climbed out, too, and stood for a second beneath the enormous pines. It was rare to see a pine so large; to see ten, maybe fifteen all in a line, all of them limned with snow, was a remarkable sight. All the air to reach the barn, summer or winter, was first filtered by the green needles.

    We circled around back, away from the road and the pines. The backyard opened onto a wide, white meadow. An oak hedgerow marked the northern border of the property; just beyond the hedgerow, a fishpond, perhaps an acre wide, pulled the snow into a volcano crater of ice and more snow. And far beyond the meadow, like the V of a goose's wing, Mt. Moosilauke cut a pyramid in the sky. Clouds and mist rolled over the mountaintop, arching slowly into the western horizon and joining again with the white snow.

    When we turned and faced the barn, this time from the southeast, I could still hardly believe the size of it. It was a true barn set on a north-south angle in a flat meadow. An enormous farmer's porch, roofed by a slope of rafters and supported by five beams, covered the entire rear of the barn. Beneath the snow the porch appeared to be fieldstone, gray rocks, mortar. Two sets of French doors, both equally spaced in the east wall, took the morning sun, what there was of it, directly on their surfaces. The glass in each door was old enough to have settled, the mottled glaze of antique glass trying to return to sand and liquid.

    Wind came off the meadow behind us. We heard it pass through the pines and saw it raise a snow devil from the field. The devil hung for a moment in the air like a genie, like a question mark, then disappeared. We stepped onto the porch. The snow here, beneath the porch roof, reached halfway up the legs of the three Adirondack chairs left by the former owners. The barn helped to block some of the wind, but it was still cold, bitterly so, and my hands felt numb. I looked at Wendy. She stood on the porch, her eyes moving quickly to take in every element of the structure. We had talked for months about this day, about finding a building like this one. It needed work and devotion, but anyone could see it would be worth the effort. It was a building with character. No amount of work would be wasted on it.

    Wind pushed at us again, and this time Wendy let it push her toward the building, toward the French doors. I followed. Like children looking through a screen door on a summer day, we put our hands up to shade our eyes and looked through the glass. Blinded for a moment by the white field behind us, I couldn't see anything in the dimness of the interior. I pressed my hand more tightly to the glass, adjusted to give myself more shade, then squinted to see.

    At about that instant Wendy's hand found mine. She did not want to hold my hand, exactly, but wanted to steady herself in the face of what we had glimpsed. Through the glass, in the dimness, we saw an enormous keeping room. It contained an open space the size of a backyard whiffleball stadium, and only beams interrupted the clear run of open flooring. A nine-foot-wide granite fireplace took up one side of the barn; a twelve-foot Irish wake table halved the room. A jigsaw puzzle lay three quarters formed on the table, and a bowl of cut hydrangea, dried to flakes, had turned into a tired corn broom. Bending to one side, my free hand still in place, I saw the southern wall, the gable end of the barn. Here, I realized, animals had once passed into the barn, the lumbering walk of the cattle across the ancient threshing floor a dull, sonorous business. Someone had removed the sliding track barn door on the southern end and had installed in its place a two-story-tall bank of windows. The glass transom above the southern door—the old farmer's transom—still held glass a century old. Charlotte had spun her web in such a barn. Cattle had once munched their evening feed in lines on either side of the barn, their heads like black and white compass needles stretching from hand-hewn stalls.

     The interior still held every feature of the original barn. Wood beams, huge beams that ran up three stories, pushed the roof to twenty or thirty feet. I had never seen a room so spacious, so tall, in a private home. Five skylights let sunshine in from above, the milky rays drifting down through the cathedral roof, through the rafters and purlins. Pegged beams, original barn boards, an enormous threshing floor. Former animal stalls on each corner of the building, from what I could see, had been converted into bedrooms. One stall served as a kitchen. A ladder, made of rough-cut lumber—more tree than lumber, actually—climbed to the roof of the kitchen where, presumably, another bedroom was located. The ladder lent the barn a tree-house feeling, a place for fun and romance.

    "All this land, too," Wendy said.

    She had already turned away from the house. Standing on the porch, we could look out across a meadow of snow. White drifts had piled against the hedgerow, some as high as basketball rims. I slipped off my gloves and pulled a copy of the realtor's sheet from the pouch of my anorak. Three acres came with the barn, flat land running roughly toward the northeast. This had been a farm once. I had known that, of course, given the presence of the barn, but I really saw it now looking across the land. The fishpond, attached to the northern end of the property, lay under snow, invisible. Only the dent in the snow and the legend of the map confirmed its presence.

    Wind tried to take the map out of my hands. Wendy grabbed the other corner. She studied the map for a second, took in what she needed, then nodded. She got it; the barn had finally stepped out of the prospectus. We stared for a little longer at the land, then back at the barn, as if we had to connect to the two things with our vision. I knew she would recall details later that I had neglected or forgotten altogether.

    I folded the map and put it back in my pouch. My fingers had begun to sting. A crow flapped across the meadow, a black kite of a bird in a white day. It landed in a pine and snow tickled down the skin of the tree.

    Wendy and I walked to the other end of the porch, the southern end. When we rounded the corner we spotted a garden. Defined by a white picket fence and a trellis arch at the entrance, the garden consisted of a white bed of snow. The owners had placed the garden outside the bank of windows on the southern end, making it the logical destination through the third and last set of French doors. Morning light would find it. In the evening it would be pale and quiet.

    "I didn't see the garden listed on the prospectus," Wendy said. "It's a lovely garden."

    "It's a lot of house," I said, not quite knowing what I meant. Or rather, not quite knowing why the appearance of the garden should make me see the barn as a lot of house.

    "It will keep you busy weeding."

    Wendy and I kissed then. It was a cold and silly kind of kiss. We pushed into the front yard. Here, at last, we could gain some perspective on the barn, its clean, classic lines, the lovely white façade. Far above, a weather vane with the letter G turned quietly in the wind. Hydrangea bushes occupied the two corners of the building—the source, obviously, of the cut flowers inside. The grayed heads of the desiccated flowers held small fields of snow. Snow sat on the picket fence of the garden and on the steep pitch of the roof.

    Standing in the center of the front yard, we decided to buy this house, to move in, to put everything we could into this building. With little talk, we made our decision before the realtor ever arrived.

* * *

Dick Gowen, an ex-football coach, is a broad, gentle fellow whose voice sounds like hay falling from a wagon. He is truly a good guy, a fair, honest man, whose sales pitch consists primarily of opening doors. He honked his horn and waved when he pulled into the driveway. Then he handed us more information about the barn along with some vintage photos the former owners had photocopied. The cold didn't seem to bother him.

    "It's unique, isn't it?" he said as he trudged through the snow in front of us. "I saw a show on television about extreme housing. It talked about people who buy old fire stations and barns and things. I guess it's a trend."

    "So are you saying we could be on TV?" I asked.

    "Maybe," he said.

    We went in through the basement directly off the driveway, passing first under an overhang—a lip, an open grin of wood and beams, used for outside storage. Someone had backed a motor boat into the overhang, the tail swallowed by the hollow of the barn, the bow covered by a tarp. Dick looked at the boat and told us the owners hadn't been up in some years; the boat belonged to another neighbor who used the overhang for storage. We nodded. We wanted to be inside. But I saw, too, how useful the overhang could be. It was an ideal place to keep wood, a barbecue grill, the three kayaks we had purchased over the years.

    Then we were inside. Cement covered the basement floor, but I hardly noticed it next to the massive fieldstone foundation. Stones the size of liquor boxes or larger stood eight feet tall around us. It was like standing in a fort. Nineteenth-century barns are not anchored by metal spikes to sills the way residential houses are, but are set on top of the foundation like a cap propped on a rectangle of stone. The sheer size of the supporting beams and floor joists astonished me. The beams measured nine by nine, sometimes larger, and ran in thirty- or forty-foot lengths. I could not imagine the trees that provided such beams. I had never entered a house that appeared so permanent.

    On our right, a small family room had been framed out of rough-sawn pine. A Franklin woodstove stood against the stone base of the enormous fireplace we had seen on the main floor. Here was where you would sit on a cold day. Heat would push up through the floor and keep the next room warm as well. Farther on, beneath the southeastern quarter of the building, someone had located the hot water heater and septic outlet pipe. On the other side of the building, a dark jumble of a room—storage and a bare dirt floor—lay dank and ugly as our worst fear of basements. Spider country, Wendy said. We barely glanced at it, although we could not pretend it didn't shake us.

    We followed Dick upstairs and into the light, because around him, flowing down from windows we had already seen, light suffused the air. Dick didn't say anything. He stepped aside and smiled and waited for our reaction. He knew, as anyone who entered the barn must know, that few people consider owning a house like this.

    Here at last was the interior. What we had glimpsed before could not compare to the impact of standing in the keeping room. I later learned that barns had been built as churches had been built. The Greek word nave, which I understood to mean aisle of a cathedral, also meant ship. A church, like a barn, is a ship turned over.

    Our eyes ran up and down the beams. Wendy took my hand for a second, but then she had to pull it away so that she could look freely. The main room, the keeping room, ranged thirty by thirty and twenty feet high. Above us, the haymow, from which the farmer had forked hay to the cattle below, ran like a dark tongue through the building. A dry log, ten feet long and flattened on one side, served as a mantel. The beams themselves, all entirely exposed, ran like ribbons of cattail-colored wood, dividing first one perspective, then the next. The skylights let the morning light sift down and through the barn and dust rose to meet it and twirled there, like memory, until the light spent itself on the threshing-room floor. In the course of a minute the light shifted and changed. Standing in the barn, we watched clouds nosing over the roof.

    "Feel free to look around," Dick said, and it was only after he spoke that I realized we hadn't actually moved beyond the top of the stairway from the basement.

    Wendy, her eyes, I knew, taking in the floor plan, the possibilities, walked forward. The owners had decorated with country touches: a wagon-wheel light fixture, a grain bin for a sideboard, moose antlers on the fireplace, a hay fork nailed high to one wall. A rope hammock dangled between two beams, the ends braided like a game of cat's cradle. The Irish wake table gave the fireplace area a sense of enclosure. Although the barn had been decorated in keeping with its nature, the owners had evidently seen it as a summer place. A few snack tables stood beside the couch; a TV, with snaggled rabbit ears, eyed the room from a place near the fireplace. The arrangement seemed temporary.

    Looking around, Dick explained that the owners had used the place when their children were young. It had been a summer retreat from Boston. In winter, they occasionally came up to ski, but when they did they stayed in the downstairs room, close to the woodstove. Otherwise no one had occupied the place during the winter. Snowmobilers used the fields outside; a hired man mowed the meadow each summer. For all intents and purposes, the barn had been empty too long for its own good.

    We listened, but only halfheartedly, because we had begun to picture ourselves here. Now and then, after spotting a new element of the barn we caught each other's eye. This too? We looked at the kitchen. It was rough. An aluminum sink rested on wooden legs carved from jack pine. The oven—which would remain with the house—was an unknown brand from the 1940s. The fridge, which resembled a black casket set up on end, stayed too. Its sides rounded back and away, art deco, or an artillery shell designed for a warship. Only after staring at it for several moments did I realize it was the exact model as our basement refrigerator had been thirty years before—our childhood refrigerator that had held the milk for seven children and the blanched carcass of the Thanksgiving turkey when no room could be made in the more modern, upstairs fridge. I pulled open the door and half expected to see a tent of aluminum foil over a desiccated turkey, a jellied, quivering plate of cranberries beside it. Instead only a yellow box of baking soda remained behind, its base surrounded by a drift of white powder. A squirrel had been at the box, its claws leaving footprints across the black roof of the fridge.

    After the kitchen, we climbed. A catwalk rimmed the northern face, taking us past shelves and shelves of books. It had been a long-standing dream of mine to have a wall covered with books, a ladder to slide back and forth across it. The barn went one better: The catwalk allowed you to browse for books and to take in the downstairs seating arrangements from an aerial perspective. I had never seen anything quite like it in a house. We stood for a long time on the catwalk, trying to gobble the house up with our eyes. From our vantage point we could at last see the configuration of the stable rooms. The bathroom and kitchen, both converted from stables, straddled the large bank of windows and occupied the southern ends. That was why, I understood, the plumbing had been beneath them in the basement. On the northern end, two stables had been transformed into bedrooms. A second floor—essentially the roofs of the ground-floor stables—had been given over to two additional bedrooms. The stables worked like building blocks. If the barn had been a conventional house, it would have been three stories tall without counting the basement.

    Then higher. We climbed a wooden staircase and worked our way out onto the hayloft. Twenty feet off the ground, we stared down at the keeping room. Dick, who stayed below, laughed and waved. We waved back, then climbed the last set of stairs to the cupola. Sea ropes, acting as banisters, ran from the cupola to the hayloft. The sense of being on a ship came back to me. Going up the final staging to the cupola, both of us slightly nervous at the height, it felt as though we had climbed a cargo ladder.

    We climbed through a hatch and into a tiny, six-by-six birdcage atop the roof. Snow and whiteness pushed away from the barn, ran up into the hills and across the meadow. Trees, below us now, resembled brushes clogged by old plaster. Tracks of birds ran in miniature necklaces across the fresh snow on the roof. The weather vane, knotted into the roof of the cupola, twisted quietly in the wind. We could see for miles in every direction. Now and then a gust pushed against the house and we watched snow rise from the roof ridge, ghosts riding into bright, cold sunshine.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from A BARN IN NEW ENGLAND by Joseph Monninger. Copyright © 2001 by Joseph Monninger. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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