The Barn

My sister and I were always trying to explore forbidden places. This habit has persisted to this day, as I frequently attempt to break into construction sites near my apartment, or force my way to the roofs of my friends’ buildings. When I was a wee one, The Forbidden Place that my sister and I pursued was our barn. The house I grew up in had an old, rotting barn connected to the rear of the building. My mother operated her store out of the ground floor of our house, while we occupied the second floor as a living space. If you followed a rear corridor on the first floor, however, you would find yourself facing an old wooden door that led to the barn. Our father, ever the disciplinarian, made it perfectly clear that this door must never be opened. Ever.

This warning was enough to stop me from pursuing our goal, but not my sister. (She had a penchant for opening the drawer in the kitchen with all the sharp, dangerous objects my parents tried to stow away.) She had a way of knowing the perfect time to evade our father’s watchful eye, which was generally in the summertime, when the store became busy with customers. One summer day when I was six years old and my sister seven, we snuck away from my mother’s studio on the ground floor of the house and into the rear corridor. Apparently my father figured that verbal warnings were more powerful than a lock on the door, because we managed to open the door on our own without any trouble.

Despite the fact that this house was in rural New Hampshire, the barn was not your typical bales-of-hay barn. The ground floor of the barn was all but deserted. Dust and stray planks of wood littered the floor, and beams of light cut through the wooden walls. My sister led the way, and decided that we ought to climb the rotting stairs to see what was hidden on the upper level. The trek up the stairs was much harder than opening the door, as we had to crawl from step to step slowly and look out for each other as we ascended. Once we reached the summit, we saw our prize: a barn cat.

As it turned out, our parents had been helping a plump, loving tabby cat who had been living in the barn since we had moved into the house when I was born. The cat was sitting on the windowsill of the barn’s upper floor window when we made it to the top of the stairs. I was wary of the cat, as I was more accustomed to animals in the form of our large black lab, but my sister was more daring and went to pet him. While she was occupied with the cat, I had a better look around. The upstairs was just as dusty and abandoned as the downstairs, but there were stacks of boxes and trunks. I am not sure if the contents of the boxes, which I quickly opened and rummaged through, were simply my parents’ old things or something left behind by the previous owner. I prefer to believe the latter, but I would bet that if I bothered to ask my parents they would give me a more heartbreaking explanation.

The descent from the upstairs was far more terrifying – and I prefer to forget it.